


Least Friend (Or Five Times Zim Was Genuinely Scary)

by Largishcat



Series: Author’s Favorites [3]
Category: Invader Zim
Genre: 5 Things, Animal Death, Bullying, Florpus Messed Zim Up, Frenemies, Gore, Horror, M/M, Original Character Death(s), Possessive Behavior, Post-Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus, Pre-Slash, Rated For Violence, Trans Character, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2020-12-24 13:48:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 24,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21100478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Largishcat/pseuds/Largishcat
Summary: Dib had another nemesis for two weeks in ninth grade until Zim stabbed him in the throat.





	1. The Time Zim Straight Up Murders a Kid

**Author's Note:**

> Meant to have the first chapter up by Halloween whoops.
> 
> Title is a reference to That One Article about the goose game.

Dib had another nemesis for two weeks in ninth grade until Zim stabbed him in the throat.

The nemesis. Not Dib.

His name was Kreg and he transferred in at the beginning of the year, a head taller and a year older than everyone else. His parents were house flippers or something and they moved five times a year, but Dib only knew that because Gretchen had heard it from Zeeta who’d heard it from The Letter M, who had taken it upon himself to warn the entirety of fourth period Algebra that the new kid was a creep.

In hindsight, Dib should have taken the warning.

He introduced himself to Kreg in the quiet minutes between third lunch and the start of sixth period, when there was no one in the hall except for kids who had a period off. He didn’t really want to be Kreg’s friend, but he had the sense that talking to him was something he should do. Dib wasn’t a kind person, but he understood loneliness. Understood what it was like to look in from the outside.

The conversation was awkward and stilted, and the whole time Kreg gave him the oddest look, like a large dog that was surprised to find a rat had come up to it and started squeaking.

“I’m just saying,” Dib said in a last ditch, desperate attempt to seem relatable, “people think I’m weird too.”

“Do they,” Kreg said, and smiled. 

Dib smiled back, relieved because he’d been sure he’d stuck his foot thoroughly in his mouth there. “I’ll see you around?” he said.

“Yeah,” Kreg said, “you will.”

There was an alley that connected Newton Ave. and Kapitsa St. that shaved five minutes off Dib’s walk home if he cut through it. When he walked home with Gaz, they went the long way and stopped by the bodega on the end of their street to get slushies, or those neon red energy drinks Gaz was into now. But Gaz had esports practice today, so Dib walked by himself.

The alley was always dim and five degrees cooler than the street, the tall buildings that walled it in blocking out any heat or light from the sun. Stepping into it always felt vaguely like stepping into a tunnel, but that was one of the reasons Dib liked it, even though it smelled perpetually of garbage. It was like a dirty little pocket dimension, separate from the rest of the city—a city that was getting more blandly sterile by the second, ever since Membrane Labs opened its second campus downtown. Sure, it was weird to be nostalgic for piles of garbage on the streets, but everything had been so _goddamn_ weird since last year’s apocalypse-that-wasn’t. Anything familiar was welcome. Even if it was the stink of rusting dumpsters.

He was aware on some level that being a teenager alone in a dark alley wasn’t the safest. (But when had Dib ever cared about his own safety?) So, he wasn’t surprised to see a figure block out the light in the alley, but it did take him a moment to process that it wasn’t Zim.

“Kreg?” he barely had time to say before he was picked up by the lapels and slammed against the wall.

“Hey, weird kid,” Kreg said pleasantly and then it was a fight.

The thing was, Dib was good in a fight. It was a natural result of having epic battles with Zim every other week. He was fast. He knew how to both deliver and take a punch and he wasn’t above fighting dirty if he had to. Which is to say he kneed Kreg in the kidneys first chance he got.

Turned out Kreg had a knife.

The smart thing to do when he finally made it home, bruised and bleeding from a shallow cut on his forearm, would have been to go straight downstairs to his dad’s lab and tell him what happened. His dad wasn’t the best at noticing things, but he was better these days about listening to Dib when he talked. Even if he still didn’t believe Dib about aliens—despite the two-_thousand_ mile long crack that was _still_ in the Earth’s crust, and the mutated _fish clone_ who was always filling their fridge with pudding. 

(At least Clembrane had figured out how to make flavors other than chocolate.)

Anyway, despite all that, Dib knew he could trust his dad to rain holy hell down on the school for not implementing adequately scientific anti-bullying measures or something. Then he’d buy the school a new computer lab and Kreg would get suspended and it wouldn’t necessarily be a result of the new computer lab, but it wouldn’t _not_ be.

That would be the smart thing to do. To tell his dad and let the easy gravity of being the son of a celebrity smooth everything back to normal.

What Dib did instead was hug the walls, keeping himself out of sight from the kitchen until he could slip up the steps to his room.

He cleaned the cut himself in the upstairs bathroom. It wasn’t deep, and it already itched more than it stung. Dib pinched the skin to either side of the cut and watched the fresh blood well up, and decided right there and then that he was going to be a stubborn idiot about this the way he was a stubborn idiot about everything. The same fundamental moronity that kept him slamming up against the brick walls of Zim and his father and _society_ was telling him that was a war now, and he couldn’t lose. This was another enemy trying to crush him down into something smaller than himself and he _could not_ allow that. Crazy kid or inferior human, Dib could not allow that.

Intellectually, Dib knew Kreg wasn’t another Zim. Zim was his eternal enemy and occasionally someone he shared a popsicle and talked about space ships with. Kreg wasn’t Dib’s anything, and that fight in the alley hadn’t been because of a fundamental disagreement over what the fate of the human race should be. It had been because Kreg wanted someone to hurt and Dib was convenient. 

The next day Gaz walked with him and they took the long way. The day after that, Dib cut through the alley and Kreg was waiting for him. Smiling.

It wasn’t every day, only when Dib took his shortcut. He wondered what Kreg did when he and Gaz took the long way around, or if he _knew_ somehow when Dib was coming. Knew when to slip into the alley, paste on his pleasant smile with its knife’s edge, and wait.

Dib quickly learned to calculate the exact degree of that edge, because it told him if it was a fistfight today or if he was honestly trying to not get stabbed.

Dib kept thinking that he should tell someone. If not his dad, then Gaz—which was basically the same as telling his dad. Or he could stop cutting through his alley. He knew that if he just stopped going that way, Kreg wouldn’t bother him anymore. 

He kept taking the shortcut, because his stupid brain had latched onto this like it latched onto Big Foot and refused to let go.

(In his more sober moments, Dib wondered why _Kreg_ kept coming back. There were easier victims out there. Ones who didn’t punch so hard. Maybe, Kreg was in it for the challenge too. Or maybe he was just having fun with the weird kid, who kicked harder than anticipated, but was still small and skinny enough to not be an actual threat.)

This would have gone on for the rest of the year if Zim hadn’t noticed. And gotten annoyed.

Dib was staring numbly into his mashed potatoes at lunch when Zim slammed his tray down across from him, making him jump.

It was surprising because Zim didn’t usually make an appearance at lunch these days, off doing sinister things in other parts of the school. Dib was actually pretty sure Zim didn’t bother showing up to the classes he didn’t share with Dib anymore either—and he only showed up at _those_ half the time. It was something Dib had been planning to investigate, before the thing with Kreg started.

Dib was sitting with Gretchen and a few of her friends, all of whom scattered as Zim’s venomous glare raked around the table. Once Dib was alone, the full weight of it came to rest on Dib.

Zim planted his hands on the table, leaning into Dib’s face.

“Have you grown tired of your freedom, human?” he hissed. He was so close Dib could see a hint of magenta through his contacts.

“What?” Dib said, but Zim was already off ranting and wasn’t about to stop to explain himself.

“I can only assume you have chosen to finally accept your pitiful fate and bow down to your overlord. Is that it, _Dib?_ Yesterday, while you did _nothing_, Zim placed mind-control chips in all the tiny chocolate baked goods you meat children were screaming about—”

“The cupcakes they had at lunch?”

“Yes, whatever, those.” Zim waved a hand, which Dib only now noticed was holding a remote control-type gadget with an antenna coming out the top. As Dib watched, Zim pressed a few buttons, and a kid two tables over went into convulsions. Writhing like a hooked eel, the kid fell over sideways off his bench, banging his head off it on the way down. He hit the ground unconscious, limbs still flailing like someone had shoved a tazer up his—

“Huh. That wasn’t supposed to happen,” Zim said. He stuffed the remote thing back in his PAK as people made a circle around the spasming kid and someone screamed to get the nurse.

“Hey,” Dib said, leaning around Zim, “is he—”

“Just fine? Yes. Now, tell—”

“Seriously, Zim, I think he’s having a brain hemorrhage—”

Zim clapped both his hands on the sides of Dib’s face, forcing his head back toward Zim. “The child monster is _fine_,” he said slowly, with emphasis. “Tell Zim what you’re doing that’s so much more _important_ than saving your puny race from brain enslavement.”

“It’s nothing, Zim.” Dib shoved Zim back and crossed his arms, not in the mood for whatever game this was. “Can’t you just let me eat lunch?”

_“Never!”_

“Okay.” Dib reached for his water bottle, his jacket sleeve riding up over his wrist.

Zim’s fingers closed around his wrist like a vice. Dib started—he hadn’t even seen Zim move—but Zim was already dragging his arm across the table; always so much stronger than he looked.

“Zim did not give you this,” he said. He pushed Dib’s sleeve up, revealing more of the bruising that Kreg had left earlier that week. 

Looking left then right to make sure no one was watching, Zim hooked a claw under one of his contacts, tilting it up to reveal the slick raspberry red of his real eye. He pulled Dib’s arm in closer. “What did this to you? What have you been doing behind Zim’s back?”

“It’s none of your business,” Dib said and tried to take his arm back from Zim. Zim’s grip tightened painfully for a moment before he let Dib go. Dib leaned back in his seat, rubbing his wrist. “It’s nothing,” he said.

“Is it nothing or is it not Zim’s business?” Zim frowned at him, letting his contact fall back into place with a disgusting _squelsh_. “Which is it? You think you can hide things from _me_, stink-worm?”

“It’s both,” Dib said, sounding sulky even to his own ears. He sighed. “I just have other things going on in my life, you know, Zim? I have other problems that aren’t you and sometimes I need to deal with _those_, okay? Just give me a little time and I’ll be back to defeating your evil schemes. I just—” he ground the palm of his hand into one eye, suddenly aware of the stress headache creeping up behind his sinuses “—I just can’t deal with you _and_ this, okay? I’m sorry.”

Dib stabbed his spork into his potatoes, concentrating on the rubbery squish instead of looking at Zim. Zim was silent for a long, long time. His gaze made the hair on the edges of Dib’s scalp prickle. He stabbed a little harder.

“You have been fighting with someone else.”

Dib’s spork skittered across the plastic tray. He looked up half expecting to see a laser gun aimed at his head, but Zim just looked puzzled. Maybe a bit annoyed. He propped his chin on his hand. “If there is another, far inferior, enemy keeping you from Zim, why do you not defeat them quickly and be done with it?” 

“I.” The problem with Zim was that it was nearly impossible to crack the thick shell of denial, narcissism, and wilful obliviousness that he wore like body armor. The single, _one_ time Dib had seen a crack in that shell, the world had nearly ended.

Zim was the same annoying asshole six days out of seven, but sometimes he would go quiet and Dib would remember the cold, helpless panic that had settled in his bones as Zim told him his dad was in an alien prison and the Armada was coming and there was _nothing_ he could do.

In hindsight, this may have been one of the reasons Dib relished the relative simplicity of getting punched in the face by Kreg.

“It’s not that simple, Zim,” he said.

Zim snorted. “Sure, uh-huh. What is it? Space pirates? A rogue Vortian? One of those Big Feets you’re always complaining about?”

Zim reached into his PAK again and was half-way to pulling out something that looked like the unholy hybrid offspring of a nerf gun, a flame-thrower, and a squid before Dib blurted out, “It’s just some kid. Another human. Put that thing _back_ before someone notices.” The flame-nerf-squid squirmed lazily in Zim’s hands.

“A human?” Zim said, and burst out laughing.

Dib crossed his arms and waited for Zim to be done. A couple people glanced over, but Zim cackling like a supervillain was nothing unusual and there were more interesting things happening. Like the kid Zim had implanted a brain-thing in getting carried out of the cafeteria on a stretcher.

“Hah… Pathetic,” Zim said, wiping his eyes. “Truly—pathetic.” He sobered, lacing his fingers in front of him on the cafeteria table. “Dib-thing,” he said in a reasonable tone of voice that made Dib’s teeth grind, “Zim is much more important than whatever games you’re playing with your fellow monkey-children. Cease the games.” His eyes narrowed. “Or does Zim need to step in and cease them for you.”

The hairs on the back of Dib’s neck tingled. Not quite rising, but thinking about it. 

“I said I could handle it, Zim,” he said, crossing his arms a little tighter, folding in on himself without meaning to. “You should stay away from—this kid, though,” he said all in a rush, thinking of the flash of Kreg’s knife in the dark. Weirdly, the idea of Zim getting stabbed by a stupid high-school bully didn’t seem… right. “He’s dangerous.”

Zim cocked his head at him. “I’m a trained soldier, Dib. Why would some random human pose a threat to me?”

“Oh,” said Dib. That was the kind of thing Zim would normally say alongside some dramatic posing, with a heavy dose of bravado. But he just sounded faintly curious now, as if he really did want to know. “I was just some random human,” Dib pointed out. “And I’ve foiled, like, all of your schemes.”

“_Ha!_ That’s what you think,” Zim said and Dib relaxed a little because that was the script he knew. Zim reached across the table and patted Dib on the arm, right over a dark bruise. “You were never a threat to me, meat creature, just an annoyance.”

Gaz had practice again, so Dib walked home alone.

He tried to go over cool one-liners for his fight with Kreg, but his mind kept drifting back to Zim. He had seemed mostly normal, and Dib wondered if the uneasy feeling he’d had was just an overactive imagination. If he’d just taken his own stress a projected it on Zim, making Zim seem off. Banter coming just a half-second too late; his twitchy intensity.

The alley looked like it always did. Empty, at first glance, but Kreg was hiding in there somewhere. He picked a different spot to hide every day. Sometimes Dib would make it almost all the way through before he’d jump out. It was another fun little facet of their game. Letting Dib think he might be in the clear.

Dib stepped off the sidewalk onto the cracked asphalt and the noises of the city faded away. He inhaled the scent of garbage and gasoline while his eyes adjusted.

Something touched Dib’s shoulder, and he was already aiming a punch before he realized that it was Zim.

Zim ducked Dib’s fist and kicked him viciously in the shin.

“_Dammit,_” Dib swore, his leg almost going out from under him. “Zim, what are you doing here?”

Zim waved a hand faux-casually, his whole posture screaming nonchalance. “I was merely passing through this filthy, rat-infested alleyway when I happened to see you. Nothing more. Is it not appropriate among you humans to say ‘hi’ when you see someone you know? The tall-but-still-inferior members of your species are always shrieking about these ‘manners’ and—” Zim’s mouth was moving, but his eyes weren’t focused on Dib. They were sweeping the alley, taking in every moldering brick and old can.

“What are you up to, Zim—” Dib started to say and froze. A larger shadow had detached itself from the alley wall, and was approaching them. Zim, still talking, hadn’t noticed. “Zim,” Dib said very slowly, “you should probably get out of here.”

“Eh? Why—?”

“Who’s your friend, weird kid?” Kreg asked, giving Dib a pleasant and slightly puzzled smile. There was an edge to it, though. If Dib had brought someone with him, then that was against the unspoken rules of their little bully and victim routine. And if the rules had been broken, maybe some other things were about to get broken too.

“He’s no one. Zim, seriously, go away—”

Zim spun on his heel towards Kreg. Kreg gave him a friendly smile, clearly enjoying this new windfall. Two victims for the price of one. An excuse to escalate.

Zim looked at Kreg blankly, then turned back to Dib. “You have been ignoring Zim over _this_,” he threw a hand dramatically towards Kreg, “overgrown _thing?_” Kreg’s smile morphed into a confused frown as he was casually dismissed by a kid he could crush like a soda can. He met Dib’s eyes over Zim’s head and raised an eyebrow. Dib gave him a helpless shrug, a sense of unreality creeping over the scene.

Kreg took a step towards them both, still looking puzzled, but obviously willing to roll with it. One kid, two kid, green kid, weird kid, what did it matter when there was violence to be done?

He was almost a head taller than Dib, but behind Zim he loomed like brick wall coming up out of the dark. Zim took no notice, his mouth open mid-rant, as Kreg reached for him. Dib was frozen, not sure if he should warn Zim or make a run for it himself, but he didn’t get a chance to make that decision.

Zim’s eyes flicked, there was a flash of metal, and then there was the sharp tip of a PAK leg sticking out the side of Kreg’s neck.

Dib stopped breathing. Time seemed to stretch and contract and it took an hour for the first dribble of blood to drip down Kreg’s chin, but then he was slumped on his side in the dirt before Dib could process that he was falling. He was making low, liquid sounds, his fingers scrabbling in the gravel.

He looked at Dib, eyes wide and wet. Red seeping into the whites as asphyxiation made the capillaries break.

Zim retracted the PAK leg with a jerk and blood sprayed. “Anyway, Dib-stink,” he said, his voice coming from a million miles away. He didn’t seem to notice Kreg trying to sit up and falling over again.

Dib felt like his head was floating a couple feet above his body. He couldn’t stop staring into Kreg’s wide, wide eyes and thinking that he’d never seen anything, even an animal, look that scared and confused before.

“Dib? Hel_lo?_” Zim’s black glove waved in front of his face, snapping his attention back to Zim. Zim frowned at him. “Are you listening to me, dirt-monster?” There was a tiny splash of wet blood on his cheek, dark brown against his green skin.

Dib turned on his heel and ran. Ran until he was home and inside behind the laser fence and the reinforced front door with its DNA lock. It was only then that he realized he hadn’t been followed.

He hadn’t been followed, but he still went downstairs and curled up under a table in his father’s lab, with his knees to his chin and his back to a wall. He used to come down here when he was very little and afraid of monsters. He’d thought that nothing evil could possibly survive in the harsh, fluorescent light. It seemed appropriate to be here now.

He stayed down there all night.


	2. The Time Dib Catches Zim Up to the Elbows in Human Guts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why did I make this chapter so long.

Dib’s spine had progressed through discomfort and pain and settled into a kind of prickly numbness. His ribs ached dully with every breath. His ass was asleep.

He was still under the lab table, in the exact same position, curled into a half-ball with his arms around his shins and his nose peeking over his knees. He’d been staring at the same crack in the floor tiles for what might’ve been thirty minutes or six hours. He didn’t know what time it was. Although, he had a vague idea that he’d been down here long enough that someone should have noticed.

His eyes itched. Everything looked both fuzzy and too bright. 

He was aware on some level that he was exhausted, but when the adrenaline had worn off, it had left a nauseous tension behind. It tasted like insomnia and metal on the back of Dib’s tongue. 

He saw the movement before he processed what it was. The flicker of something moving in front of a light source making all his tired muscles seize up and his heart pound in sudden, instinctual panic. He curled up tighter, hugging his knees to himself so tight his whole body shook with the effort of trying to seem small.

Even when his dad’s familiar rubber boots came into view, he couldn’t relax, despite the relief being so intense that he felt high from it.

The quiet whir of mechanical joints warned Dib before his dad knelt down, one hand braced on the edge of the table. Dib looked up to see worried eyebrows over familiar, reflective goggles. He knew he looked awful and knew he wasn’t going to be able to explain why. Hoped he wouldn’t be asked to, because he was pretty sure if he tried to talk right now, he would start crying and wouldn’t be able to stop.

“You didn’t come down for breakfast,” his dad said. A question wrapped up in the protective cover of a statement.

Breakfast. That meant it was Saturday morning. They had breakfast on Saturday mornings because family meals were something they did now. 

(Not every day and not all the time. His dad still had to rush out early to the labs some mornings, Dib was out late often enough that he didn’t bother to call, and Gaz had her own things, but there was an unspoken agreement that on Saturday mornings there would be pancakes, or _chilaquiles_ with eggs, or or a full _kahvalti_ spread if Foodio was feeling adventurous, and the three of them would all come and sit and eat and take turns distracting Clembrane so he wouldn’t ruin everything with pudding.)

Breakfast meant Dib had crawled under this table on Friday night and now it was Saturday morning. No wonder his spine felt like it was made out of static.

His dad was still waiting, quiet and patient, for Dib to answer. But Dib didn’t know what would come out of his mouth if he opened it, so he kept it shut and buried in his knees.

“Are you alright?” his dad asked eventually. Dib shrugged, then realized there was no point in trying to act casual while wedged under the furniture like a scared cat. He shook his head.

“Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?”

He shook his head.

“Okay.”

Sometimes, Dib felt bad for being a difficult child. He knew he could swing from combative to secretive to demanding, so fast it must be dizzying to watch. He knew he got into trouble too much, and he knew that his dad had stepped in more than once to stop the consequences of things—like getting into fights at school, or stalking a substitute teacher for four weeks because he’d been convinced she was a vampire—from hitting him full in the face.

Other times, the resentment of years of never _ever_ being believed or taken seriously long enough to _explain_ welled up like blood from a cut. Some things were better—and family therapy turned out to be good for something—but some were too ingrained to be smoothed away by board game nights and everyone trying their very best.

Also, that substitute teacher hadn’t been a vampire, but she _had_ been part of an evil cult trying to turn people into zombies.

Families were complicated. 

Dib let his eyes slide shut, brief spike of adrenaline fading back into the ache of sleep deprivation.

The lab was silent for a while. Then the air conditioning switched on and he heard his dad sigh. Rubber creaked and fabric shifted and there was a thunk and a bitten-off curse. A big, warm presence settled beside Dib, under the table. Dib didn’t open his eyes right away, but he leaned into it, letting his dad take some of his weight.

Slowly, Dib shifted position, stiff muscles screaming as he stretched out his legs. A spike of sharp pain lanced through his ribs as his binder shifted with him and he hissed through his teeth. He adjusted himself into a position where he could breathe without feeling like his ribs were about to pop.

His dad was awkwardly hunched over, too tall to fit comfortably under a standard lab table. Dib knew if he sat up straight, his head would press against the underside of the table too.

They sat in silence. Dib was pretty sure he could hear the gears in his dad’s head clicking, but he didn’t seem like he was going to try and make Dib talk.

Dib heard the stomping footsteps coming down the steps before Gaz’s voice called out. “Where the hell are you guys? Foodio is gonna cry again if no one eats his French toast.” Gaz thumped her way into the lab, walking past them first, before doubling back to where Dib’s boots stuck out from under the table, alongside his dad’s. 

She stood for a moment in front of their hiding place, then squatted down, balanced on the balls of her feet. She gave Dib a long, searching look. Then she stood up again and walked away.

Dib listened to her jogging back up the stairs. A few minutes later, she was back, with her Switch tucked under one arm.

She clambered over them both, elbowing Dib until he scooted over to give her more room. Gaz tucked herself in tight to his side, which pressed him up against his dad, who had been as immovable as a brick wall Dib’s whole life and didn’t budge now. It left him kinda squished. Still, he slowly began to relax, surrounded on all sides by the gentle pressure of his family, listening to the quiet _bwing bwing_ sounds of Gaz’s game, and his dad’s steady breathing.

He was on the verge of drifting off when he realized something. “Guys,” he rasped, voice hoarse with stress and lack of sleep, “are you trying to thundershirt me?”

They all climbed out from under the table and went upstairs eventually, after Foodio’s sounds of distress became audible from the basement. Dib rushed upstairs to free his rib cage and swaddle himself in three layers of sweatshirts. 

He stepped back into the hallway to see Gaz casually leaning against the wall across from his room. She glanced up from her game.

“You have to eat with us,” she said.

Dib licked his lips. “Yeah, I’m coming.”

Breakfast was okay. Dib didn’t notice Clembrane coming and didn't manage to get his plate out of the way in time, but it turned out chocolate pudding and French toast wasn’t a bad flavor combination. He managed to eat, and no one tried to make him talk about anything. 

(That wasn’t surprising. Feelings weren’t something any of them knew how to talk about with any kind of grace.)

Dib moved through the rest of the weekend in a kind of haze. Everyone continued to not make him talk about it, but he also never seemed to end up alone for very long.

It was subtle, they weren’t pushy about it, but all weekend his dad and Gaz executed a kind of silent, artful choreography in which Dib was maneuvered from table to couch to backyard to living room floor for board game night without once being in a room by himself for more than five minutes. He allowed this without complaint, drifting along in his family’s wake. He sectioned off the parts of his brain that were still screaming that he was in _danger_, he was in _more danger_ than previously thought, and let Gaz pick a fight with him over the rules of Double Piggy Insanity Checkers.

But the weekend was only so long, and Dib had to go back to the real world eventually.

He woke up Monday morning with cold dread pooling in his lungs like snot. He dragged himself out of bed anyway. Got dressed, ate a piece of toast, said yes when his dad asked him if he was okay to go to school, because if he was still feeling under the weather that was _fine_ and—

“I’m okay,” Dib said, pulling the strap of his backpack over one shoulder. “I’m okay. I’ll see you later.”

He didn’t know what he’d find at school, but whatever it was, he needed to know. He needed to figure out where he stood and where he needed to go from here. He needed to figure out where _Zim_ stood. After everything that had happened last year, Zim had quieted down. His schemes came further apart and sometimes the way he screamed and ranted seemed almost... listless. Listless for Zim, anyway.

Dib'd assumed his crushing defeat had leached some of his enthusiasm for world-conquering and he was too stubborn to admit it. But what if Zim hadn't scaled back all his operations, just the visible parts.

What if he was preparing to escalate.

Whatever was happening, it was up to Dib to stop it. It was always up to Dib. Zim was _his_ responsibility, and that didn’t change because Dib was--because Dib had seen someone die. If anything, the fact that Zim was willing to kill a human in broad daylight, ten feet away from a public street, made beating him more urgent than ever.

That thought carried him up the skool steps and through the doors.

Stepping inside, Dib was immediately swept up in a flow of students heading to the auditorium. 

“Special assembly! _Special assembly!_” they chanted, the sound echoing off lockers and concrete floors. Normally, Dib would have wondered how they had the energy to scream this early in the morning, but today he was filled with jittery, over-caffeinated energy and thought he understood. He could use a good scream too. 

His eyes scanned the crowd as he was pushed along by the crush of bodies, looking for any hint of green.

There wasn’t one. That was both a relief and not a surprise. Zim used to be pathological about getting to school on time, never missing a day, but even he had eventually figured out that you didn’t actually _get_ anything for having perfect attendance. He might not show up until fourth period calc, if at all. Maybe it would be a quiet day, and Dib would get a chance to reset and do some detective work. Ask around a bit to see what the rumor mill was saying about Kreg.

It turned out he didn’t have to, because the special assembly was _all_ about Kreg. 

The blindingly chipper vice principal stood next to a bored-looking female cop on stage, and together they explained very kindly to all the assembled children that one of their little friends had been reported missing by his parents over the weekend, and if anyone had any information they thought might be useful, they should tell the nice officer here.

Well, Dib thought with a sinking feeling, at least it saved him the trouble of trying to talk to the other kids. 

Everyone rushed for the main doors the second they were dismissed, but Dib headed in the opposite direction, against the crowd. “Hey,” he said, flagging down the police officer as she tried to creep out of the auditorium through the side door. “What happened to Kreg? Have the police found anything?”

The cop sighed, reluctantly letting go of the door handle and turning to Dib. “Sure, random child, why don’t I just tell you all the details of an ongoing police investigation?”

“I’d really appreciate it,” Dib said.

“Well, since you’re being so polite about it,” the cop said, hooking her thumbs into her belt. “No one’s seen the missing kid for about forty-eight hours, but we don’t suspect foul play at this time, because then we’d have to donate actual manpower to it. Personally, I think it’s just another case of a kid getting too high at his friend’s house and forgetting to phone home. I’d just wait for him to show up, but ever since that _incident_ last year, we have to treat cases like this with all the,” she made air quotes, “‘seriousness’ that they’re ‘due’.”

“Kreg is new in town,” Dib said, “he doesn’t really have any friends.”

“That’s great information, kid,” the cop said. “I’ll be sure to write that down.” She did not write it down.

Zim didn’t show up to school that day. 

Gaz was skipping practice, but Dib told her he had to run an errand and she let him go with only a suspicious look. He let his feet take him along the familiar path without any input from his brain, until he found himself at the mouth of the alley again. Peering into the gloom.

There wasn’t a body, but Dib hadn’t really expected there to be. 

There was no trace left. Not even a stain where Kreg had bled out. Dib stared down at the ground, his brain ticking away, trying to figure out what about the clean, dark asphalt was making the hairs on the back of his neck prickle.

It clicked, finally. There wasn’t just no blood, there was _nothing_ on the ground. There was no broken glass, no random bits of garbage. Even the greasy, oil-slick coating on the asphalt was missing. It could have been poured that morning, if it wasn't for the cracks.

Dib pulled up the magnifying app on his phone and began to investigate the whole alley, inch by inch. Slowly at first, but fast abandoning caution to run from wall to dumpster to trash can to empty bottle. Even the discarded condom wrappers didn't escape his increasingly frantic examination.

Everything would have looked completely normal at a glance, but it became more obvious with each passing second that someone had _scrubbed_ the alley from top to bottom. Dib could see the line ten feet up on the walls where clean brick gave way to old grime. The smell of baked garbage was gone too, replaced with a sterile, antiseptic smell. The metal dumpsters had been polished until the green paint shone. He found a dead rat that looked like it had had its fur shampooed.

Dib got down on his hands and knees, searching the ground, looking for a scrap of old gum, a bottle cap, anything. There wasn’t even anything left in the _cracks_.

He finally found a single penny, wedged deep in a gash in the asphalt. He dug it out with his keys.

He held it in his fingers, turning it over and over again.

This whole situation was… different. This wasn’t another big, flashy Zim mess. Dib had always been aware on some level that Zim had killed people before. Alien people, human people. (And he could assume not all of those many explosions had been casualty-free.) But he’d never _seen_ it up close like this, and never seen what happened afterwards; never bothered to step in and actually inspect the smoking craters. There was no crater here, though, just a suspiciously clean alleyway.

The idea that Zim was capable of leaving no trace like this was disturbing. It made Dib wonder what else Zim had done that no one had ever gotten wind of.

Dib stood up, letting the penny fall to the ground with a quiet _ting_.

The process of deciding to go to Zim’s house was less an orderly journey from point A to conclusion B, and more Dib realizing that breaking into Zim’s base was what he was already doing as he was wedging his credit card into the lock on Zim's back door.

Dib hesitated with his credit card half way in—somehow, Zim’s advanced alien base was still vulnerable to the primitive human art of lock-picking—and wondered if maybe he shouldn’t just go home. Sit in Gaz’s room watching her play Overwatch for a couple hours and let Kreg stay missing. Go to school the next day and stop Zim’s latest scheme to steal every orange cat in the city or whatever and let everything settle back into an easy routine. 

There was no day to save here. Kreg was already dead.

Dib shook his head like he could shake off the doubt. Turning back and trying to forget about everything simply was not an option. It wasn't who Dib was. Dib was the _person who stopped Zim_/

(Two years since Zim had landed on this ugly wreck of a planet and already he was so twisted up in Dib’s self-identity that it was like he’d never been anywhere else.)

The inside of Zim’s base looked the same as it always had and, bizarrely, that made Dib relax. 

The sight of Zim's ugly, weird living room made everything feel normal for a second. Like Dib was about to sneak downstairs and blow up whatever dumb experiment Zim was working on, and there’d be plenty of property damage, but no one would _really_ get hurt. It felt like Zim was up to something stupid and Dib was here to stop him. Normal.

Even as Dib’s breathing slowed and evened out—he hadn’t noticed how fast and choked it had been coming—there was a part of him that was still very aware that he was here to find Kreg’s corpse. 

He’d failed to stop Zim from killing Kreg, but he could still do this. There _was_ still a day to save, because if he could get Kreg's body back he could show it to everyone and they'd all know what Zim had done and they'd _have_ to do something.

They couldn’t ignore a body the way they ignored everything else.

He realized that he was just standing there, right inside the door. Zim’s little robot was staring at him from the couch, flickering lights from the muted television reflecting in its glass eyes. Dib raised a hand and waved at it cautiously. It waved back.

“Hi,” Dib said, “uh, have you seen Zim?”

The robot seemed to think about this for a moment, rubbing its metal chin. Not for the first time, Dib wondered why Zim had programmed his robot with human body language when he was going to disguise it as a dog. Or perhaps it had picked up its mannerisms on its own. Zim did seem to give it a lot of autonomy. For some reason.

“My master’s downstairs,” the little robot said, interrupting Dib’s thoughts.

“Thanks,” Dib said and started edging past the couch, towards to secret elevator in the trash can. Half-way there and he turned back around, figuring there was no harm in asking, “Did you happen to see Zim taking a dead human kid through here? A couple of days ago?”

The robots eyes narrowed and it gave Dib a sly smile. “_Maybe._”

It had been a while since Dib was in the lower levels of Zim's base. The first thing he noticed was that it was very quiet. Zim was nowhere to be seen, and nowhere to be heard either. The second thing he noticed was that everything seemed off. 

On the surface, it was the same simultaneously cluttered and sterile place Dib remembered, but the dimensions seemed off. Like the walls had been rearranged somehow or all moved five feet over. It made Dib feel off-balance. He kept making turns that should have led to more corridors, but instead led to dead ends. Zim’s base had become, at some point, as familiar as his own backyard, but now it seemed strange again. Alien.

Frustrated, Dib kicked one of the walls and heard something weird in the way the metal rang against the steel tips of his boots. He did it again. Hollow.

Okay, that lent credence to his someone-moved-the-walls-around-in-here theory.

With a new sense of purpose, he paced back through the corridors, picking up a metal pipe to bang on the walls. He spent a good twenty minutes hitting things, which both made him feel better and made the air reverberate. Everything was metal. When the walls rang like this, it was like being inside a huge, twisted bell.

In the moments after the echoes finally faded, Dib heard something. A quiet noise a little ways away. He down his pipe and went to investigate.

It was the superweapon that Zim had, for some reason, chose to disguise as a tiny purple moose. Dib flattened himself to the wall, in the shadow of a hulking piece of machinery. He swore he saw the moose’s little bug eyes swivel towards his hiding spot, but it passed him by without pausing. He saw it was holding something in its nubby front legs. Something alarmingly shiny and sharp. 

He waited for it to get a couple of meters ahead of him then followed, sticking to the shadows.

He kept swearing the moose noticed him, but it didn’t stop or turn around. It led him on a winding path through the base. Eventually coming to a stop in front of a blank wall. Dib hid, watching.

The moose squealed and cracks opened in the wall, running up through the metal until they formed the shape of a doorway. It had been completely hidden, flush with the red metal. 

The moose floated through and Dib waited until the absolute last second before slipping in after, just as the doors were sliding shut. He glanced behind him and saw that the seam of the door was invisible from this side, and there was no sign of a control panel or opening mechanism. It looked like forward was the only option.

He turned, facing into the hallway before him. It was _dark_. The air was noticeably chillier and damp, like he'd just stepped inside the mouth of a cave. This section of Zim's base, whatever it was, was completely un-mapped.

Dib took a step into the gloom, eyes wide to capture what little light there was and ear's straining to pick up any sound.

The corridor he walked down was narrower and more cramped than the rest of Zim’s base. Irken architecture seemed to favor high, vaulted ceilings and wide round rooms, but the construction here was utilitarian. Claustrophobic. It served a purpose; it wasn’t here to impress.

The floor slanted slightly downward, and as Dib walked further, he began to feel the pressure in his eardrums. He must be very far underground.

The first room he came to was barely any wider than the hallway. And it didn’t give Dib any more elbow room because every spare inch was crammed with storage shelves, piled high with haphazard stacks of alien junk. 

Dib recognized some of them. There was the trout-locator—he’d never learned why Zim made that thing. There was a box of chocolate cupcakes, suspiciously glossy and perfect. There was what looked like a pile of scrap metal. There was a… knife ball. It glinted sinisterly in the low light, perched precarious and sharp on the edge of a shelf.

It really was so _dark_ in this place. The main base was lit for drama, with plenty of long shadows for a sneaky human to hide it, but there was _light_. This place was lit for a species with better night vision than Dib. One that didn't need as much room to maneuver. 

(When had Zim dug himself a warren? It couldn’t have been here this whole time. Dib would have noticed. Right?)

The knife ball made an alarming, high-pitched whine when Dib leaned in for a closer look so he hurried past it.

The storage room led him into a wider and, if possible, even less well lit room. Hulking shapes loomed out of the darkness. Dib paused at the doorway, letting his eyes adjust to the deep gloom.

Oh, cool. Those were tanks full of animal corpses.

There were dozens of the cylindrical tanks, like a grove of giant test tubes. Some of them were empty. One of them notably was full of an entire cow, neatly bisected down the middle, revealing red muscle and purple guts.

Reluctant, Dib stepped further into the room. Whatever he found in here, he was sure he wasn't going to like it.

The liquid in the nearest tank was thick and milky, it gave the chimpanzee body—_where the fuck had Zim gotten a chimpanzee_—inside a soft look. Or maybe it was puffy from waterlog. Or old. Its flesh looked ragged around the edges, like the specimens in the biology lab that had been soaking in formaldehyde longer than Dib had been alive. The shape of it looked eerily human, floating down here in the dark.

A couple tanks down, there was a perfect cross-section of a deer, suspended in tank that must have been at least seven feet tall, stretching up to the dark ceiling.

Dib found himself slowing, staring. The cross-section had been taken so it ran from the tip of one antler all the way down to two of the hoofs. It couldn’t have been more than an inch thick, but somehow the thinly-sliced guts stayed perfectly in place. Dib had the impression of the rings of a tree, except all in shades of pink and red.

He shook his head. This wasn’t what he’d come for and he couldn’t afford to get distracted now. He walked faster, past cats with their faces peeled off, dogs that were just skeletons with bits of fuzzy flesh still clinging to the bones, a pigeon sewed onto a chicken sewed onto a turkey with a big scribbled sign on the tank that said _this was a stupid idea_.

His attention caught on a small tank that looked like a repurposed household aquarium. The glass was plastered with college-ruled notebook paper, which seemed so incongruous that Dib had to stop and look.

On the paper were what looked like sketches for a realistic dog suit, along with cramped and crooked writing in the weird hieroglyphs that made up Zim’s language. In one corner, in English, Zim had scribbled _GIR still refuses to wear the improved suit_. “Still” was underlined three times. Dib peeled back a couple of pages to peer inside the tank and saw the half dissected body of Mrs. Douglas’s dog Kipsy, which had gone missing two months ago.

He let the paper fall back into place. This was stupid. It was creepy, kinda gross, but ultimately who _cared_ if Zim was having fun chopping up neighborhood pets. There were bigger things at stake, and Zim obviously wasn’t learning anything from his little mad science experiments. Last week, Dib had overheard him asking one of the lunch ladies what breed of chicken laid nuggets.

Dib turned away in disgust found himself staring into the clouded eyes of a human corpse.

Every muscle in Dib’s body seized up, rooting him into the floor, unable to look away.

The body was in a tank too small for it. Limbs twisted strangely and blank face pressed up against the glass like it was peering out. It looked like it had been stuffed in there as an afterthought, but apart from that the body was pristine. Skin pale, unmarked and unblemished, hair drifting gently around its face. 

It had been a woman once. Dib didn’t recognize her.

If you stare at your own reflection in the mirror for too long, it will start to morph and change. This isn’t because of anything sinister, it’s just the nature of human eyes and the human brain that staring at anything too long will make you start to see things that aren’t there.

So, when Dib thought he saw the body’s mouth drifting open, then _gaping_, gaping open in a silent scream--

That wasn’t real. It was a trick of the light and Dib’s imagination. The dead didn’t scream.

Dib did, though.

He ran, not looking where he was going, sprinting towards the nearest exit he could see. He didn’t notice that the exit wasn’t the one he came from, but one that led deeper in.

He slammed through it and sank back against the cool metal of the wall. Eyes closed, chest heaving.

“Dib?”

His eyes shot back open and he saw Zim, red eyes wide and antennae cocked in confusion. He was wearing a red lab coat over his usual uniform and had some kind of contraption on his head that looked like a cross between a bike helmet and a jeweler’s magnifying glasses. In his hands, he had a long coil of writhing intestine, which snaked out from the open stomach of a human body, strapped to an operating table before him, surrounded by thrumming and blinking machines.

The body jerked and Dib realized whoever it was was still alive. It flopped its head to the side and its eyes rolled to look at him and Dib realized it was Kreg.

“Dib?” Zim said again. He dropped the coil of intestine, leaving it to dangle and wiggle off the side of the table. There was a rack to the side of the table, with hooks. More coils of intestine spasmed and jerked there like giant worms. 

On metal legs, Zim stepped over the operating table towards where Dib stood frozen in place. “How did you—did Gir let you in? I’ve told him a _million_ times—”

Dib wasn’t listening. For the second time in this nightmare of a week, his eyes were caught on Kreg’s. Only, there was nothing in those eyes this time. No fear, no questions, just dumb, animal suffering.

“Dib-thing,” Zim said, irritated, reaching for him with gloved hands dripping in blood, “you’re going to ruin Zim’s research. I need a sterile environment for—”

“What are you _doing_ to him?” Dib blurted out, shrinking further back against the wall.

“Hmm?” Zim looked over his shoulder, then back at Dib. “I know you’re stupid, human, but you’ve seen a dissection before. We performed one on one of those tiny pig monsters last year in Biology.”

“Vivisection.”

“Huh?”

“Vivisection,” Dib repeated dully. He climbed to his feet and pushed past Zim, feeling tacky blood come off on his skin, towards Kreg. “It’s a vivisection if it’s still alive.”

“Oh,” Zim said. Behind him, Dib heard the click and scrape of metal legs on the metal floor. “Zim did not need the clarification.” Dib came to the edge of the table, staring down at Kreg’s twisted, discolored face. He looked back up at Dib, still no sign of recognition. Was he even alive? Or was Zim just keeping the body going so he could watch Kreg's guts wiggle.

Off to the side, Zim made a frustrated noise. “If you’re going to be in my lab, can you at least wash the filth off your _filthy_ skin before you start touching things?” Kreg made a low gurgling noise. It almost got lost under the sudden chorus of beeping from the half-dozen machines he was hooked up to.

“_Again!?_” Zim swooped in to twist dials and push buttons until the noise quieted. “Why does the red pumpy organ keep going still for _no reason?_”

“Shock, probably,” Dib said. He reached out, wrapped his fingers around a fistful of wires, and yanked. Things immediately got very loud. High alarms started to sound again as Dib pulled wires by the handful, sparks flying as his movements became more and more violent.

He managed to get maybe half of them out before Zim rammed into him.

“What are you _doing_?” Zim shrieked. He rose up, up on metal spider legs until his body was almost lost in the shadows on the ceiling. The tip of one leg slammed into the floor by Dib’s head, and he scrambled out of the way, rolling until he hit the legs of the table. He ducked under it, using the cover to reach out for the machines. He grabbed a thick cord, and pulled, the machine sliding across the floor until it banged up against the table. 

Dib pulled so hard he could feel the strain going from his wrist all the way up his shoulder. Finally, after an age, the plastic coating on the cord ripped and it came away in his hand.

He must have broken something important this time because he was rewarded with a shower of sparks, the blare of an even louder alarm, and Zim’s wordless yell of rage.

Dib dived out from under the table in time to dodge another attack from Zim’s PAK legs. “You ruined it!” Zim howled. He grabbed a scalpel from a tray and Dib decided that was a good time to run.

The scalpel thunked into the doorframe, but Dib was already gone.


	3. The Time Zim Overestimates Dib's Abilities and Nearly Kills Him

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for the nice comments! I usually don't write chapter fics, but this has been very fun so far.

Dib ran flat out, arms pumping, wind whistling by his ears. The tanks with their gruesome contents flashed by him in a blur of fur and washed out skin and red muscle and guts, guts, _guts_. Behind him rose the deafening blare of alarms, and above even that, the tornado siren howl of Zim’s voice.

(Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw the dead woman twist its already twisted neck to follow him as he sprinted past. He didn’t stop to look.)

The clatter of Zim’s PAK legs against the floor echoed loud in a room made up of all glass and metal. That was good, because it gave Dib enough warning to dive out of the way just before Zim would have had him.

He slid around the side of the nearest tank—the huge one with the cow in it. Zim skittered to a sliding stop. The floor was smooth and those legs didn’t have any kind of traction.

It only took a second for Zim to turn himself around, but that was enough time for Dib squeeze himself through the tight gap between the tank and the wall and then duck behind the next one. 

Dib tried to think over the pounding of his heart. He’d thought himself out of tighter scrapes than this. 

(When?) 

Zim was faster than Dib when he was on all fours. That wasn’t usually a problem because _usually_ Dib was the one chasing _Zim_, and humans were persistence hunters or whatever, so being fast didn’t matter as much as endurance. Dib was good at that. Some might say that one of his defining characteristics was that he never knew when to fucking stop—

The issue here, was that Dib’s usual prey had turned around and shown its teeth, and Dib was realizing that he had no idea what to do when he was on the pointy end of the spear.

This metaphor was getting away from him. He should pay less attention in anthropology.

The tip of Zim’s PAK leg punched through the glass where Dib’s head had been seconds ago. It caught, which gave Dib the split-second he needed to make it past the final tanks and into the storage room, with its overstuffed shelves and piles of alien junk.

“_Dib!_” Zim yelled after him. Dib heard the sound of glass shattering, and the wet splatter of liquid hitting the floor. Presumably, as Zim got frustrated and just yanked his leg free. “Why must you always turn up and _ruin_ everything!? Zim works hard! _So_ hard! And I get no respect from you or—”

Dib couldn’t find a mechanism to close the door behind him, so he grabbed the nearest shelf. It turned out to not be attached to the wall, and Dib brought it down with a crash that cut off the end of Zim’s sentence.

Dib brought another shelf down on top of it. Alarming bits of tech and sharp pieces of metal scattered all over the floor. Dib was glad for the reinforced thickness of his boots.

He backed up, his breath coming ragged, putting distance between himself and the barricaded doorway. He became aware that his fingers stung. He held up one hand to his face and saw that the skin was crisscrossed with thin burns, already blistering. They must’ve been from the wires he’d grabbed with no care for his bare skin.

Something slammed against the barricade and Dib held his breath, ready to run if it didn’t hold. The shelves shook, but the combined weight of the metal and all the junk on it seemed to be too much for Zim to move. He heard Zim curse, then it was quiet for a moment.

Only a moment. There was a clatter of metal on metal, rapidly moving towards him from above, then Zim dropped down from the ceiling.

Dib turned to run, but Zim did something where he braced himself against two shelves and the floor and _flipped_ over Dib. He landed between Dib and the exit.

Objectively, it was a cool move. Unobjectively, Dib really needed Zim to stop being cool right _now_ because there wasn’t enough room to maneuver around him in the cramped storage room, and Dib needed _out_ of this buried horror tomb full of corpses and science fiction nightmares. 

“Got you now,” Zim hissed. “Prepare to _pay_ for your—”

Out of the corner of his eye, Dib saw the knife ball glinting. He lunged for it. The blades bit into the flesh of his hands, and the whole thing began to whine like an evil teakettle, but Dib ignored the pain. He whipped around, throwing the knife ball right into Zim’s face like a shot put.

He heard the deep _shlunk_ of metal burying itself in flesh. Pink blood splattered onto the ground as Zim reared back and screamed. Dib slid through the gap between Zim’s stumbling PAK legs, getting some distance.

He sprinted through the narrow hallway that he’d first come through, his ears popping as the pressure changed. Behind him, he heard a series of crashes and Zim’s voice yelling something he couldn’t understand.

The end of the corridor came up fast. Dib skidded to a halt just as he remembered that there was, in fact, _no door_. No visible one, anyway.

“You wretched! Little! _Animal!”_ Zim’s voice was closer now, gaining on him.

Okay, Dib had to think _very_ fast. There had to be a way out of this because if there wasn’t, Dib was actually, _honestly_ going to die, and they would never ever find his body, and his dad and Gaz would think he’d run away and that would break both their hearts, and they’d walk sadly through the streets looking for him not knowing that his corpse was miles below their feet, all twisted up in a too-small specimen jar.

Dib knew he was hyperventilating, working himself into a panic, but he couldn’t seem to stop.

How the _fuck_ was he supposed to get through a blank wall? Why had he marched in here with no exit strategy? That was Swollen Eyeball rule number three: never confront a creature in a place you can’t get out of.

(Rule number one was: don’t put yourself in harm’s way, but no paranormal investigator worth their salt actually paid attention to rule one.)

There was a way out, though. There had to be. He’d just _seen_ Zim bypass a blocked door—

—By going through the ceiling. There were ventilation shafts down here. Ones big enough to crawl through.

Dib switched the flashlight on his phone on and began to scan high up on the walls, near where they met the ceiling. 

_There_. A grate. Big enough for Zim to squeeze through, and hopefully big enough for Dib to as well. The ceiling was low enough that Dib could reach the edge of it, hooking his fingernails under the metal lip and pulling.

It didn’t budge.

He glanced over his shoulder, trying to gauge how much time he had left, and felt the bottom drop out of his stomach.

Zim was at the end of the long hallway. He was moving slowly, stumbling and bumping off the walls. As he got closer, Dib saw that Zim’s face was covered in deep gashes. One eye was closed, oozing pink and white fluid. He looked _pissed_.

He wasn’t going to wait around for that. 

The hallway was narrow as well as short, and Dib’s last growth spurt had left him with more leg than he knew what to do with which, for once, was about to come in handy. He braced his back against one wall, his feet against the other, and inch wormed his way up. He planted his feet under the grate, hooked his bleeding fingers in the metal slats, and pulled. The metal buckled and for a moment Dib thought he’d break it before he got it open, but it came off with a screech in his hands. 

He dropped it, clattering to the ground, and reached out to grab the sides of the vent. Trying to ignore the sounds of Zim speeding up, he executed a weird, wiggly somersault, until he was in a position where he could slither into the vent on his stomach.

He wriggled like his life depended on it. Which, as far as he was concerned, it did. He was fully inside and almost at the first turn before Zim made it to the end of the hallway.

“Why didn’t you just use the door!?” Zim yelled after him.

“I don’t know _how_ to use the door!” Dib yelled back.

“What? But it’s so simple. You just have to—“

Dib turned the first bend. 

He knew he wouldn’t be able to make it all the way back to the surface using just the vents—even though they must be pumping fresh air in from outside. They were miles underground. But he was pretty sure he could navigate his way back to the main part of Zim’s base. The plan right now was to exit the vents as close to one of the elevators as he could manage, and get back to the surface.

He didn’t let himself think too hard about how much noise he was making. The vents were tight. Too narrow for him to be able to crawl. He dug his fingers into the seams in the metal and used them to drag himself along, navigating by the mental map he'd formed over years of breaking into Zim's base.

There were openings for the air to blow out every ten feet or so, which where doing a lot to help Dib orient himself. He slowed as he passed each one, holding his breath, half expecting to see Zim behind each one.

After maybe twenty minutes of worming his way through the ceiling, he saw the familiar dull red of the main antechambers. He peered down through the criss cross metal of the grate, eyes peeled for any hint of movement.

When he was sure no one was coming, he rotated as best he could inside the vent until he could bang his heels on the grate. The grated opened outwards and there was no real way to do this quietly, so instead he’d have to be fast. He got as much leverage as he could and brought his feet down with an echoing _clang_. God, that was so loud. He did it again, and again, until the metal buckled and fell with a crash to the floor below.

Not giving himself time to overthink, Dib swung his legs through the opening and let himself drop, catching himself on the lip of the opening so he was dangling with his shoes about four feet off the floor.

Or, that was the plan. Dib had forgotten than his hands were burned and cut and still slippery with blood. Pain jolted through his hands and he fell with a yelp.

He managed to land on his feet, knees bending to soften the impact, but it was a near thing.

He stood, wincing.

Zim didn’t immediately rise up out of the floor to eviscerate him, so Dib started jogging toward where he knew the nearest elevator was. It was a couple chambers over, and the process of getting there was the most stressful thing Dib had done in his entire life. Including coming out to his dad. Every shadow was full of glinting, sharp threats. Every second he didn’t see Zim made him more certain that he’d be lying in wait around the next corner.

Somehow, the fact that he was able to slip into the elevator and press the button for the surface without incident made him more nervous, not less.

(Maybe Zim had gotten turned around somewhere in his own maze. With one good eye and all the twisting halls of his base, it would be easy to lose your way.)

The elevator let him out of Zim’s fridge. He had to fight his way past several damp and rancid-smelling bags of frozen chicken nuggets.

The little robot wasn’t on the couch anymore. It had left the television on, playing the Angry Monkey Show on mute. It gave the living room an eerie, abandoned feeling. Zim’s house was always full of noise--yelling, whirring machines, crashes and bangs, explosions--but now it was silent.

A lamp in the corner flickered and Dib nearly had a heart attack. The hairs on the back of his neck were going crazy. Like they were full of static electricity. Dib's ear's strained for any sound, his whole body a coiled spring, ready to _bounce_ the second he sensed anything. But there was nothing. 

He turned a circle in the center of the room, scanning the floor, the walls, the furniture, everything. 

The door was right there and nothing was blocking his way, but some instinct kept Dib rooted to the spot. There was a trap here, but he wasn't going to know what it was until it was already sprung.

He took a step forward and stepping in something wet. There was a tiny puddle of something thick and streaky pink. It looked disgustingly organic.

Dib realized he was an idiot the same time he heard the tiniest sound coming from right above him. Dib whipped his head and sure enough, there was Zim, on the ceiling. His PAK legs were splayed wide, braced on the exposed pipes of the ceiling. He looked like some kind of huge, nightmare spider. The kind that hunted instead of making webs.

There was a long moment when time seemed to stretch. Dib looking up and Zim looking down and the whole world holding its breath.

Zim dropped. Dib tried to scramble back, but reacted a split second too late and ended up on his ass with Zim looming over him.

A glob of pink fluid dripped from Zim's ruined eye. It fell in slow motion past Dib’s cheek.

“_There_,” Zim said. He lowered himself down until his face was inches from Dib’s. “Now I have you. How dare you come into my home and interfere with my experiments? You think you can keep your pathetic secrets from me, _human?_ You couldn’t hide your huge beast-monster-friend from me, and you can’t hide the secrets of the inferior human body from me either, no matter _how_ many of my specimens you kill. Maybe you should replace the Kreg-beast, hmm? How would you like that? Zim knows about this ‘shock’ now. Zim could keep you alive for a _long_ time.”

This was all stuff that Zim had threatened him with before. But it hit differently when Dib was on his back watching Zim’s eyeball drip down his cheek, with the quiet noise Kreg had made right before he had flat lined still ringing in his ears.

In that moment, Dib’s vision of himself stuffed into a tube came rushing back in full force.

He wasn’t afraid of pain, not really. It wasn’t the idea of Zim cutting into him that made his blood run cold. It was the idea of being just another dead thing, hidden underground where no one would ever find him. 

Despite how much danger Dib regularly put himself in, he didn’t think about dying much, in the way children generally don’t. He was thinking about it now.

“Dib?” Zim was frowning. “Are you going to say something back, or—”

_”Get off me,”_ Dib said. A small, dissociated piece of him cringed at how shrill he sounded. How his voice cracked. Panicked and _uncool_. But most of his brain was preoccupied with the base, animal need to get _away_.

“Not your best,” Zim said. Dib jammed his thumb into Zim’s eye socket.

Zim reared back, his scream so ragged it was almost a buzz. Dib scrambled away from him, diving for the front door. He felt cold pain cut across his back, but he was out the door, past the gnomes, and running down the street before he registered the blood soaking the back of his shirt.

He heard the scrape of metal against concrete and chanced a glance over his shoulder. Zim was sprinting on his PAK legs down the dark street, left eye screwed completely shut, fury twisting his face. He wasn’t screaming anymore. 

Dib’s heart was pounding so hard it felt like his whole skull vibrated with it. Dark houses and high fences flashed past him as he ran.

He cut to the right, jumping to catch the top of the nearest fence, bracing himself for the pain this time so he wouldn’t lose his grip. If he could convince someone to open the door for him—Zim was too cautious to follow him into a strange human’s home without his disguise. It might be enough to save Dib.

(And if he was wrong, that was more death on his hands.)

Dib was almost over the fence when he felt clawed hands grab the back of his shirt. Zim yanked him off the fence and flung him so far into the street that he skidded across the asphalt, opening up the skin all along his right arm.

Vaulting back to his feet, Dib switched tactics. He headed for the streetlamps that marked the beginning of Main Street. It wasn’t so late that there weren’t still cars out. He could flag someone down, duck into a convenience store—or maybe the bright lights would be enough to keep Zim away, like some kind of nightmare creature that could only survive in the dark.

A gust of air ruffled the hair on the top of Dib’s head, then Zim landed directly in front of him, metal legs kicking up sparks on the road. 

He bared his teeth. _No way out, Dib-stink._

Dib skidded to a halt. There was a stitch crawling up his side. The wound on his back stung, his arm hurt, and his ribs were beginning to ache. When Zim had slashed open his back, he’d fucked up Dib’s binder somehow and now it was sitting all wrong. Even with adrenaline making his blood feel carbonated, the pain signals were starting to creep through. Too many for his abused body to ignore for much longer.

He wasn’t going to be able to run forever. He needed to get somewhere safe.

Out of the darkness, the opening of the alley loomed like a cavemouth. That alley had started so much trouble, but maybe it could serve its intended function one more time. It could be a _shortcut_. On the other side was Dib’s street, and if Dib could make it _home_—even just to the end of his front yard, within shouting distance, close enough to trigger the emergency defenses—

Dib started off running and Zim kept pace with him. Not catching him, but constantly on his heels. 

The thought occurred to him that Zim might be toying with him, but Dib pushed that away in favor of putting on another burst of speed. He made it to the mouth of the alley a good ten feet ahead of Zim.

The cool darkness enveloped him like an old friend.

It wasn’t a long alley. He was half way through in a matter of seconds. He could see the dim street lamps of his street—

Zim came at him from the side, slamming him hard into a dumpster. Dib caught the corner on his ribs and he felt something in his chest _pop_. That wasn’t good.

Zim pressed him harder into the dumpster until Dib cried out in pain, then he was gone again, letting Dib sag.

Dib managed to catch himself before he landed on his knees. He set out towards the streetlamps again in a kind of unsteady half-jog, expecting Zim to knock him flying again, but he stumbled out into the dim pool of light mostly upright and mostly intact.

(The lights were off in every house he could see. How _late_ was it?)

It seemed to take a year to make to the end of his own driveway. It was like one of those dreams where you had to run, but you could only move in slow motion.

Dib took a step onto the stone walkway that led up to his front door, then he was whipping around before he consciously registered that he’d heard a sound, fist chambered by his side. He used that momentum to drive his fist squarely into Zim’s gut. Pain ricocheted around his own chest even as he heard the _oof_ of Zim’s breath leaving him.

Zim staggered back a step, clutching his middle. 

_“Why_ are you like this?” he gasped, but he was already recovering. Steadying himself, letting his arms drop to his sides.

Dib backed up, not taking his eyes off Zim. Zim had snuck up behind him enough times today.

He inched backwards. If he could get close enough to the front door, he could shout his panic code. That would trigger the house’s defense systems. It wouldn’t be _impossible_ for Zim to kill him in the seconds between the alarm sounding and the robot guards smashing out of the decorative flower pots that lined the laser fence, but it would be harder.

He was just thinking that he might have a chance when Zim moved. Dib was staring directly at him. It was like he blinked out of existence for a second, and then Dib’s legs were yanked out from under him.

For the second time tonight, Dib found himself on his back staring up at Zim. Except there was nothing in Zim’s face this time but incandescent fury. He grabbed Dib by the collar, lifting him half off the ground.

_“Why are you like this?”_ Zim screamed into his face, droplets of spit landing on his skin. “Why can’t you—”

Panicking, Dib reached up, trying to claw at Zim’s face.

Zim grabbed his thumb and wrenched it sideways. The bone snapped like a twig. The scream got caught somewhere in the back of Dib’s throat, and came out as a whimper.

Zim bounced his head against the concrete and the world went fuzzy and slow. Zim’s voice stretched out long, incomprehensible and sticky in Dib’s ears. He was aware that things were moving above and around him, but his vision was going all weird so he couldn’t quite tell what any of it was.

He felt a piercing pain in his right wrist, then his left. It took a huge effort of will to turn his head. It made nausea surge in his stomach, which was almost worse than the pain.

The knife-tip of one of Zim's legs was buried in his wrist, pinning him to the stone path. Dib watched dully as blood bubbled around the edges of the puncture wound, dripping down to the ground. 

That seemed like a lot of blood.

“Zim?” Dib slurred. With an effort, he moved his head again. He was probably about to throw up. Zim’s mouth was moving which meant he was talking about something, but Dib couldn’t hear anything over the ringing in his ears. Dib tried to raise his hand to wipe sweat out of his eyes, but a tearing pain stopped him. Right, pinned.

He couldn’t seem to hang onto any one thought. They swirled confusingly. He kept thinking about the entomology project he’d had to do in seventh grade bio. All those insects pinned on styrofoam with their little legs splayed out. Helpless and dead. He thought he knew how they felt.

His throat clicked when he tried to speak. It took him a couple of tries to get words out.

“Zim.” Zim was a blur of green and motion above him, hands waving, light glinting against his teeth. “Zim, I think I might die.”

Zim swooped in closer, right in Dib’s face. This close, Dib could almost understand what he was saying, but it came in and out like a weak radio signal.

“—Stupid—you—bzz—shock—?” Zim said.

Dib tried to shake his head and immediately regretted it. “No,” he said. “Maybe?” he felt himself fading, black spots starting to pop up in the corners of his vision. “Blood loss. Gonna pass out. Don’t—put me in a tank. Don't. Please.”

He felt pain in his wrists again, but couldn’t tell from what. Consciousness was slipping away from him too fast.

Right before the blackness took him, he thought he heard the familiar sound of his own doorbell, but that couldn’t be right.


	4. The Time Zim Makes Dib Realize Nowhere is Truly Safe

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for this chapter: hate crime mention. No actual hate crimes happen, but Professor Membrane finds his trans son beaten almost to death on his front lawn and draws a conclusion.

“It was Zim!” somebody was yelling. Dib was confused to realize it wasn’t him.

“Honey, that’s ridiculous. A child couldn’t have done this to—” That was his dad’s voice.

“Dad, it was _fucking Zim_.” Wait. That was Gaz speaking. “It hasn’t been a big deal until now, but Dib _almost died_, okay? _I_ found him—you didn’t see him. You didn’t see him in the yard, okay? He looked _dead_. I thought he was _dead_”.

“That must have been hard,” Dad said, slipping into platitudes that would have been kind when said to a stranger, but were unimaginably cruel when said to your own children. He still did that sometimes. Still treated them like strangers.

Gaz screamed wordlessly. Muffled, like her hands were over her face. Dib wanted to open his eyes and look, but he was having trouble picking up his eyelids. They felt like they were weighted down. His whole body felt heavy and distant. It was so rare for Gaz to argue with their dad; Dib was disappointing that he wasn’t going to be able to watch. If he could use get one eyelid open a crack.

“I need you,” Gaz said, voice calm except for a tiny, almost undetectable tremor, “to take this seriously.”

There was a long pause.

“You need me to take this _seriously?”_ Oh, Dad was angry, Dib realized. That didn’t happen very often. Their father ran the gamut from fond exasperation to the kind of disappointment that made Dib feel sick to his stomach, but he was so rarely _angry_. A little thread of nervousness twisted through the fog in Dib’s mind. “What part of this,” the sound of stiff fabric shifting, like his dad was gesturing, “_exactly_,” his dad’s voice was rising, “do you think I’m not taking seriously?”

“The part where I tell you Dib’s in _danger_.”

“I know he’s in danger!” Dad snapped. He took a deep breath, just a little ragged. “Gaz, I _know._ Somebody did this to him. Somebody put my son in the hospital. I know you must be very upset and scared right now, because that’s how I feel. It’s easy to fall back on superstition and magical thinking when we feel scared. It’s easy to get hysterical.”

“I’m not—”

_“Especially_ when it’s something we’ve heard repeated over and over again. But we’re better than that, and this family is not going to delude itself or pretend that some imaginary space monster hurt Dib, when we know it was a sad, ignorant, and hateful human.” 

“But—”

“Gaz, if you care about your brother, you _will not_ feed into his delusions. Not right now.” A plastic chair squeaked with finality. “Keep an eye on him. I’m going to speak to the doctors.” He heard his dad’s footsteps retreat and fade.

Gaz sighed. There was more squeaking and a screech as a plastic chair was dragged over the floor, then Dib’s bed dipped.

“I know you’re awake,” Gaz said. She peeled open one of Dib’s eyelids. Her face was nothing but a brown and purple blur at first, but slowly it came into focus. Dib blinked and found that he could keep his eyelids open on his own. Gaz smiled at him. The expression looked awkward on her face. Her eyes were red around the edges, like they got when she pulled an all nighter playing League. “Dad thinks you got hate-crimed.”

Dib tried to speak but the words came out as a sad kind of wheeze. His throat felt unbearably scratchy.

“I know what happened.”

Wheeze.

“You’re going to have some sick puncture scars on your wrists, you know? I’m going to tell everyone you got crucified. Like dork Jesus.”

Dib laughed, but the laugh turned into a cough and coughing _hurt_. He curled in on himself, trying to get his body back under control. 

“Hey, _hey_,” Gaza’s hands were on him. She helped him lay back, and pushed a cup of ice chips into his hands. “Don’t do that. If I make you pop another rib, Debra’s gonna shoot me.”

“Who?” Dib managed to croak. Gaz jabbed her thumb over her shoulder and for the first time Dib noticed they weren’t alone in the room. Standing with her back to the wall was a tall woman in a dark suit. She had an earpiece curling into the collar of her crisp, white shirt. Her lips quirked up into a small crooked smile when Dib met her eyes.

“Bodyguard?” Dib asked Gaz.

“Oh yeah. Dad’s got this whole floor locked down like Fort Knox. There are, like, checkpoints on the way to the bathroom. It’s annoying.” Gaz stole one of his ice chips. “He wanted to clear out the top three floors to make it more defensible or something, but they managed to talk him down to just this floor, as long as they let him install lasers on all the windows. The hospital director was almost crying. It was kinda funny.” The ice chip cracked loudly between Gaz’s teeth. She didn’t look like she thought it was funny.

(They’d never talked about it, but Dib thought it bothered her sometimes, being Professor Membrane’s Kid. The way it was like living in a slightly separate reality from everyone else. One where you could _do_ things like bully a private hospital into letting you make last-minute renovations, make stalking charges disappear, make anything inconvenient disappear.

Gaz had almost killed a kid once. It had been over something stupid, but the most closely guarded Membrane family secret was that none of them had any clue where the line between acceptable and way too fucking far was. Genetic line-blindness.

The parents had threatened to go public, but all they’d gone was quiet. Dib hoped his dad had paid them off. Sometimes, he wondered if Gaz regretted it, but the NDAs his dad had made everyone sign meant he couldn’t bring it up in family therapy.)

Dib was breathing a little easier now. He leaned back on the pillows. They were very plush.

“I’ll help you,” Gaz said.

“What?” Dib said. He was feeling warm and a little floaty. He must be on a lot of painkillers.

“After you’re better. I’ll help you get Zim,” Gaz said, her mouth set in a grim line.

All the warmth drained from Dib, like someone had replaced his blood with ice water. _“No,”_ he blurted. 

Gaz’s entire face slammed closed like a door. “What do you mean, _no?”_ she said, an undercurrent of danger in her voice.

“I—” Dib wasn’t any good at talking to his family when painkillers _weren’t_ making him feel like his skull was stuffed with cotton. He felt all the wrong words like _you don’t understand_ and _I don’t want you to get hurt_ crowding up against the backs of his teeth. They would just piss Gaz off, because Gaz was the toughest and most fearless person Dib knew, but she didn’t have all the facts, just some of them. She thought they were still using the old playbook.

Dib knew in his bones, soul, and _viscera_ that he could not let Zim near his family. Zim was only vaguely aware that Dib _had_ a family most of the time, and that was how it needed to stay.

There just wasn’t a good way to tell Gaz that. If he told her he was really, honestly scared that she might get killed, she’d just say “yeah, whatever, dude” and walk into something she wouldn’t walk out of.

This was all too much for Dib’s achy, drug-filled brain. 

“It wasn’t Zim,” Dib said, picking the worst of all possible options, and knowing it even before Gaz’s eyes widened in anger.

“Why,” she said, “are you lying to me right now.”

“I’m not,” Dib said weakly.

“The _fuck_ you’re not.”

“Let him talk, Gaz,” Dad said. Gaz flinched and Dib did too a moment later, reactions a split-second too slow. Their dad had come back into the room while they were staring at each other. For such a large man, he sometimes moved like a ghost. 

He approached Dib’s bed, the thick fabric of his lab coat swishing in the suddenly silent room. His eyebrows were drawn together over his goggles, worried. The dark lenses were as impenetrable as ever. “Son,” he said, “can you tell me what happened?”

“I—” Dib’s eyes flicked to Gaz, who looked seconds away from exploding. His dad’s hand came down on Gaz’s shoulder. Gentle, but Dib knew how heavy those hands were. Cold, even through a layer of rubber. 

Dib licked his lips. “I didn’t see them. I don’t remember much. I’m sorry.”

Gaz’s eye twitched and his dad sighed. “That’s a pity,” he said, a note of disappointment in his voice that made Dib’s insides twist. He let go of Gaz’s shoulder, his gloved hand trailing up to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. “I would have killed them.”

_“Dad,”_ Gaz said through gritted teeth, “remember what we talked about with Dr. Welch?” 

“Oh, right. Positive affirmational communication,” his dad said, a little sheepishly. He let go of Gaz’s hair and returned his full attention to Dib. “Son, nothing that happened is your fault. You have the full support of your family. I am here for you, in whatever capacity you need, now and always. I love you both very much.” He paused. “Killing people is wrong.”

Gaz refused to talk to him for the rest of the day, but she stayed, so Dib didn’t mind too much. He drifted in and out of a shallow doze to the quiet dings and pwings of her game. 

(It sounded like classic Mario. Gaz only played Mario when she was really, really upset.)

Their dad came in and out, sometimes flanked by doctors or nurses who came to check Dib’s vitals, shine lights into his eyes, or give him pills, or make sure he was comfortable enough.

He was, actually. He was aware in the back of his mind that he should be in a lot of pain—and, like, the pain was _almost_ there, but the drugs were keeping it at bay for now. Apart from that, everything was great. His bed was soft, he had this nice little throw blanket thing which was keeping his feet very cozy. His room was pretty plush all around. It looked like a cross between a hotel and a hospital. The walls were painted cream instead of sterile white, there were actual curtains on the window. The only thing that ruined the whole comfort and tranquility vibe was the faint red glow of the laser bars across his window.

It was those bars that woke him up hours later. At least, he thought it was the bars.

It was dark outside, and someone had switched off the lights in his room. The red glow was much more noticeable in the gloom. If Dib let his eyes unfocus, they looked a little like a neon sign. They shone through the thin curtains. 

One of the bars flickered, just a little, as Dib watched.

“Hey,” Dib croaked.

“Yeah?” said the woman from earlier. Debra. Her shoes clicked across the floor as she approached Dib’s bed.

“Can you find some blinds or something? The light is keeping me up.”

“Can do you one better,” she said and drew something across Dib’s field of vision that blocked out the window entirely. “Bam. You’ve got privacy curtains. Get some sleep, kid.”

Dib did.

Gaz was still angry with him when she visited the next day. She spent four hours curled up in a hospital chair, playing on her Switch, muttering under her breath and snapping at Dib if he breathed too loudly. He was still glad of the company. When he was alone, all he had to look at was the floral watercolor on the wall across from his bed and all he had to do was think, because reading and television both gave him a headache.

The headaches would get better as his concussion healed, the doctor told him.

“You have a little, _tiny_ skull fracture,” Debra told him, holding up two fingers a centimeter apart. She was fast becoming his favorite of the rotating cast of bodyguards who haunted his room like besuited ghosts. “Whoever got you, got you good.”

That was why she was his favorite. A) she talked to him when he was bored and B) she didn’t feel sorry for him at all. And he _knew_ must be a pitiful sight, all bruised up and broken and _skull fractured_, but she treated him like just another dumb kid it was her job to protect. Also, she snuck him in a suckmonkey.

“You know, I’ve worked for celebrities before,” she said as Dib tried his best to drown himself in icy, chocolatey, monkey goodness. “Your dad’s the weirdest out of all of them, I think. And I once did a gig for Shia LaBeouf.”

She laughed at him when Dib found out the hard way that brain freeze and concussions did not mix.

The other bodyguards were all vaguely identical in Dib’s mind, and they didn’t seem to mind that Dib couldn’t remember any of their names. They weren’t unfriendly, exactly, but they weren’t interested in talking to him. One of them was guarding his room now, leaning casually against the wall. Alert, but relaxed.

Dib was dozing. Gaz had been here earlier, but she had slipped out between one blink and the next.

Dib was busy floating on a cloud of painkillers and plush pillows, so he didn’t mind.

It was kind of nice, this whole thing. Apart from the constant, low-grade headache, and the flashes of pain that sometimes slipped through. He’d seen more of his family in the last few days than in the past month, and was surprising himself by enjoying it. 

He was too old to admit to enjoying thing like _quality time_, but there was something comforting about Gaz lurking in his room like a sullen, dark spector, and his father stalking the halls like an avenging angel, all in white, ready to vaporize anyone who came to hurt Dib.

Also being around them was just kind of… nice. They all led such separate lives, most of the time.

Dib’s eyes slipped shut for a second and when he opened them again the light slanting in from the window was warm and angled and he was alone in his room.

A stirring of vague unease rose in the back of Dib’s sleepy brain. He hadn’t been alone once since he’d been admitted to the hospital. The guard shift changed every four or five hours, but they traded off inside Dib’s room, so even then he was never by himself.

(Maybe whoever was on duty had snuck off to the bathroom?)

Alarm bells were trying to ring inside Dib’s head, but they couldn’t with all the cotton already in there. Dib kind of wanted to go back to sleep, and deal with whatever was happening later.

Something rattled. It was so faint that Dib almost didn’t hear it. Reluctantly, he lifted his head and scanned the room. Nothing seemed out of place. 

The rattle came again, louder this time. Dib caught movement out of the corner of his eye and followed it to the door. The door handle jiggled. Slowly, it turned until it was vertical with the floor. Time slowed to a crawl. Then somebody tried to tug the door open and time sped up again. The door handle jerked back and forth with increasing violence until the entire door rattled in its frame. 

It rattled louder, harder. A puff of plaster dust fell to the floor—

—Then, as quick as it had started, it was over. The doorknob was released, springing back to its resting position. Whoever was on the other side didn’t try to open it again. Dib knew, because he stared at it until, eventually, drugs and the exhaustion of a healing body dragged him back into sleep.

“I wanted to speak to you about something,” said Dib’s dad. He was perched on the edge of one of the hospital chairs, which looked comically small under him. Dib was sitting upright, propped up on pillows. Two cups of hot tea were steaming on the bedside table, side by side.

“Is it about why I have two men in black now?” Dib said, glancing at the two suited bodyguards who now flanked his door. One of them was Debra. She gave Dib a little wave behind his dad’s back. “What’s that about?”

“Ah, um,” Dib’s dad rubbed the back of his neck. “There was an incident. Nothing you need to worry yourself about. No, I was hoping to speak to you about something else.”

“Okay,” Dib said. “I mean, I’m not going anywhere.”

“I was thinking,” his dad was twiddling his thumbs, looking a little nervous. As nervous as someone could look with their whole face hidden, “after you’re recovered, it might be a good time for you to start interning at the lab. You’re almost fifteen, now. It would be excellent experience.” The rubber of his gloves squeaked against itself. “And, if I’m being honest, I’d be more comfortable knowing where you were after school.”

He reached for his cup of tea, pulling down the collar of his lab coat to take a sip. Dib caught a glimpse of the ragged scars that bisected his dad’s face, the hint of teeth peaking out through the gash in his upper lip, and the pink empty space where the tip of his nose was missing, before he pulled his collar back up.

“Okay,” Dib said.

“Okay?” His dad raised his head, surprised.

“Yeah,” Dib said, “I think that sounds like a good idea.”

“Okay,” Dad said. The skin around his goggles crinkled up in a smile.

Did was sitting bolt upright in bed before he even registered the sharp _crack_ of something hitting the floor.

The lights turned on and he was blinded, cold sweat on his skin, still half inside a dream that he couldn’t remember anything about except that it had made him afraid.

Two pairs of polished shoes clicked across the floor.

“Looks like the painting just fell,” said one of the bodyguards. “Nail must’ve given out.”

“See, what happens when you put the hook straight into the plaster. You have to find a support.” 

Dib let his hands fall from his face, squinting into the bright room. Tonight’s two men in black were staring down at the watercolor painting that had been across from Dib’s bed, guns held casually by their sides. As one, they turned and headed back to their posts on either side of the door.

One of them paused by Dib’s bed, tucking his gun back into its side holster. “Go back to sleep, kid, it’s nothing.” He squinted, seeing something in Dib’s face. “Bad dreams?”

“Yeah,” Dib said, rubbing his hand over his face.

“What about?”

“I don’t know,” Dib said, the dream had left nothing but the impression of an overwhelming quiet that had chilled Dib down to his bones. “I think I dreamed I was dead.”

“Hey, what’s that?” Debra said. She was pointing at the bare patch where the watercolor had been.

Dib swallowed his spoonful of oatmeal. “My painting fell,” he told her. Some orderlies had been by earlier to take away the broken frame and sweep up the plaster dust.

“No, I mean what are _those_,” Debra said. She pointed to something up and to the right of the slightly darker square of paint. “You only had the one painting, right? Looks like they never bothered to spackle over the old holes. Where those always there?”

Now that she was pointing them out, Dib saw them too. Two little puncture marks in the plaster, spaced about a foot apart, one right on top of where the painting had been.

“Oh, wow, there are a _lot_ of them. That one’s right up by the ceiling. Ruggles, come look at these.”

Dib put his spoon down. Suddenly, his oatmeal wasn’t sitting right.

“What do you think those are?”

“They’re nothing,” Dib snapped. “Don’t you two have a job to do?”

Gaz pushed him in a wheelchair across the front lawn. Dib could walk now, but only for short distances. Four people in suits trailed behind them, but far enough away that Dib could ignore them.

The sunlight felt strange on Dib’s skin. Warm and tingly. 

They came to a stop underneath a Japanese Maple overlooking a little pond. There was a white duck right in the center. Dib watched it bob up and down. Gaz sat down on the bench.

“You’re getting better fast,” Gaz said without inflection. She was also looking at the duck.

“Yeah,” Dib said. “They said at this rate, my ribs should be knit in another week or so. The doctor said it usually takes six weeks, but, you know, science baby.”

“Science baby,” Gaz agreed. She pulled her Switch out of her bag, but didn’t power it on, letting it rest in her lap. “Dad’s treating me like I’m gonna have a mental breakdown any second.”

“Sorry,” Dib said, hoping to head the conversation off before it started.

“I think he’s scared that he’s going to end up with two crazy children.”

Dib winced.

“You know, it really _sucks_ that when I try to back you up, you turn around and make me look like an idiot. Like, I know you got hit in the head, but fuck you.”

“Hey,” Dib said, anger flickering to life behind his broken ribs, “fuck you back. You’ve never backed me up before, you don’t get to—”

“It was never a _big deal_ before now,” Gaz said, turning her glare from the duck to Dib. “You and Zim were just playing your _stupid_ games, with your _stupid_ plans, and your _stupid_ screaming. You pretended it was all this big, important thing, but it wasn’t. It was just you and your stupid boyfriend playing pretend.”

Dib remembered something his therapist had told him once, about anger being an emotion that people used to cover up other emotions that they’d rather not show. Like a thin coat of paint over dry rot.

(His therapist had a thing for home improvement metaphors.)

Dib wasn’t kind, and he wasn’t especially empathetic, but he had a good memory. And he knew his sister.

“You’re scared,” he said. Gaz punched him in the upper arm. A little too hard to be friendly, a little too gentle to be unfriendly. “Ow,” he said. “No really,” he said, “I’ve got your number.”

_”You’re_ fucking scared,” Gaz said. She paused. “You’re never scared.”

Dib blinked. “Yeah, I guess I’m too dumb to know when to be afraid,” he tried to joke, but it was a little too close to the truth and fell flat. They were both silent for a long moment.

“Why are you scared now—“ Gaz said at the same time Dib blurted, “Don’t go after Zim.”

Gaz immediately leveled a furious and incredulous glare at him. “What.”

Dib sighed. “Please, don’t go after Zim. I’m serious. He’s dangerous—like really, _really_ dangerous. Like, I _knew_ he was dangerous, but I didn’t really _know_, you know?” Dib made a flailing gesture. Maybe erratic movement would serve him where words were failing. “It’s like—it’s like someone gave me a ball of uranium when I was a kid. And I was old enough to know that uranium was radioactive, but I only knew that because people told me it was? So, like, I knew that, but it was easy to forget. And the uranium ball was this cool green color, and it glowed in the dark, so I played with it. And it was fine for a long time, but then my fingernails started falling off and I suddenly remembered that hey, uranium is radioactive.”

Gaz gave him a flat look. “That is the most tortured analogy I’ve ever heard,” she said. “And the radioactive ball is still an idiot.”

“The last time we underestimated him, dad got thrown in space jail and the world almost got eaten by a space anomaly.”

Gaz grimaced and looked away, not wanting to admit Dib had a point. “He tried to kill you. I can’t do nothing.”

“I don’t think he did,” Dib said. “I can handle it,” he said.

Gaz smacked her hands against the wood of the bench, the sound loud enough that it made the duck startle, flapping its wings before settling back down to float. “Which _is_ it?” She growled. “Is Zim suddenly super, extra special, shiny dangerous, or can you handle it?”

“Uh, both?”

Gaz stood up and walked away. Dib supposed that was better than getting pushed into the pond.

Dib woke up in the middle of the night, hyperventilating. There was no sound in the room except for the faint buzz of the lasers. It was just his dreams that had woken him up this time.

He curled up on his side, trying to calm his breathing, but it kept coming faster and faster and—

“Hey.” Metal rattled as someone pulled back his privacy curtains, and a warm hand curled around his shoulder. His bedside lamp clicked on and he blinked up into Debra’s concerned face.

“You’re okay,” she told him. “You’re safe here. Breath with me, kid.”

Four bodyguards all spontaneously got nosebleeds while switching shifts. Debra was one of them.

They seemed fine, otherwise, but it left everyone shaken. Dad unleashed an army of minibots to check the entire hospital for contanements, and they moved Dib to a new room. It was almost identical to his old room. Except it had a painting of a pomegranate, cracked open, with the red seeds spilling out.

Dib sat on the floor with his back against the side of the bed, wearing soft pajama pants and a Membrane Labs hoodie. It was still early October, but something about the scene felt like winter break. Three cups of tea steamed off to the side. His dad and Gaz sat across from him, playing cards spread out on the floor between them.

Dib felt relaxed and happy. A little floaty, but they were weaning him down to a lower dose of painkillers, so not too floaty.

Gaz slapped down a card. “Take four, bitch.” Uno really brought out her competitive streak.

“Fine,” Dib sighed. It had been almost ten days since he’d been admitted. Dib was aware that they would be sending him home soon, but for now he didn’t have to think about it. He could just play cards, here behind the hospital’s thick walls, and the quietly buzzing lasers.

A minibot tried to peer inside Dib’s teacup, but his dad shooed it away.

He was walking through the gardens by himself, Debra hovering at his elbow in case he stumbled, and another one of the suits following behind with the wheelchair, in case he got tired. Dib didn’t feel tired, though. He was enjoying the feeling of the grass under his feet.

They passed by the pond and Dib thought he saw a flash of metal just underneath the surface of the water, but when he turned to look, there was nothing there but a white duck.

Dib thought that duck must be unpopular, because it always seemed to be alone.

One of the bodyguards collapsed in the hallway, bleeding from both ears. Dib didn’t see it, but Debra told him about it later. She looked worried.

“Hey,” Dib said to Gaz. She’d taken his jello cup and had a plastic spoon in her mouth, so she just grunted to acknowledge he’d talked. “I think I’m done.”

She popped the spoon out of her mouth. “With what?”

“Zim,” Dib said and saw Gaz go still. He twisted his fingers in his sheet, feeling the soft material begin to fray. “I’m going to start interning at the labs. That’ll take up most of my Zim chasing time, anyway.”

“You’re not worried he’s gonna conquer the Earth or something while you’re not looking?”

Dib’s fingers twisted harder. “No. You were right. Most of his schemes aren’t dangerous. If anything gets big enough to end up on the news, I’ll step in, but if he’s just stuffing squirrels into rockets or something stupid, I’m not going to bother.” What he didn’t say was that he wasn’t sure if he _could_ face Zim again after everything, without collapsing into a quivering ball.

Dib didn’t _want_ to give up on exposing Zim, but he wasn’t sure he had a choice. He still wanted to be Earth’s hero, but there was nothing heroic about the nightmares that kept him up half the night. There would be nothing heroic about getting himself killed.

Gaz dug out a large spoonful of green jello. They both watched it jiggle. “Dad’ll be happy,” she said.

“I’m not giving up on _all_ of it. You still have to go Bigfoot hunting with me over Thanksgiving break.”

Gaz groaned dramatically and stuffed the spoon in her mouth. “Fine,” she said. Dib thought she approved, “but if you do go after Zim again, you’re taking me with you.”

“I’ll allow it,” Dib said, meaning the opposite.

“Yeah, I wasn’t asking.”

Dib hated the time right after visiting hours the most. When Dad and Gaz were gone, but it was still too early to go to sleep. In the silence, his mind wandered to places he’d rather it not wander to. 

Like to what on Earth he was going to do once they discharged him. And to Zim. 

He just didn’t know what to expect, and was incapable of thinking about it rationally. It felt like Zim would be waiting for him on his front lawn, ready to pick right back up where they left off. Like he was going to pop out of the woodwork at any moment. 

Dib was under 24/7 guard in a tricked out wing of a private hospital that his dad had designed specifically to be impregnable, but paranoia still buzzed in the back of his mind. That was the problem with no longer being drugged to the gills, it meant the little background thrum of panic that had started up when Kreg had died and hadn’t quieted since was back.

Dib was aware that trauma could forge new neural pathways. It rewired the brain. It was something the in-hospital counselor liked to talk about.

(He thinks she was trying to help him process. Professor Membrane’s kid, so he must want to know the science behind the fact that he can’t sleep through the night, right? Isn’t it interesting how you can be made to feel so frightened and helpless that it never truly leaves you?

Isn’t it interesting how something that happened to you can leave your mind and your body full of ghosts? Isn’t it funny how you’re a paranormal investigator, Dib, but the haunted house is you.)

“It will get better,” she’d said, but Dib heard _everything is changed and it will never be the same again_. She had smiled at him and he did his best to smile back. “You may feel helpless, but know that you are not. Help will be there for you when you need it. You are safe now.”

Dib blinked awake. He’d forgotten the switch off the bedside lamp before he drifted off. The warm glow was muted in the way light only got in the wee hours of the morning. It made everything it touched look like it had been soaked in honey. 

The little digital clock next to it was blinking _00:00_. That was weird. Next to the clock, Dib saw, in increasing confusion, was a small glass vase that he didn’t remember. It had a purple bow tied neatly around its neck, and it was filled with—was that asparagus?

“I have brought you traditional human healing gifts,” Zim said from right beside his ear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I very foolishly decided to do both Yuletide and the ZADR discord secret santa this year, so the next and final chapter might be a little slow in coming.


	5. The Time Zim Threatens to Kill Dib's Family

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A million thanks and kisses to [syrupwit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/syrupwit/pseuds/syrupwit) for looking over this chapter for me and assuring me it didn't suck.

Dib clapped his hands over his mouth, muffling the scream.

Something soft bounced off his hip and landed on the bed. Slowly, moving by centimeters, Dib sat upright. He picked up the soft thing and turned it over in his hands.

It was a stuffed toy scorpion, a little bit smaller than a football. In its plush front claws it held a little white card that said _Be Better_.

That seemed about right.

Slowly, Dib turned his head, raised his eyes to look at Zim. He noted that Zim was wearing his disguise, distantly. Everything seemed distant.

Dib had wondered—had spent sleepless nights staring at the ceiling thinking about—what would happen when he saw Zim again. If he’d even be able to look at Zim without going catatonic. If he’d collapse into a panic every time he heard the click of metal on metal for the rest of his life. If he’d ever be able to live normally again, without flinching at every shadow.

Now, seeing Zim perched on the edge of a hospital chair—the one Gaz always took—with his legs dangling a foot off the ground, Dib didn’t feel fear. Or, he did, but he was only aware of it from a distance. Mostly, he felt nothing at all. He was as cold and blank as the inside of a brand new fridge.

He couldn’t read the expression on Zim’s face, but he seemed to be waiting for something.

“Are the guards dead?” Dib whispered into the silence. There was a heavy, muffled quality to the air inside the circle of his privacy curtain, and it felt dangerous to disturb it. The glow of his bedside lamp reached the edge of the curtains and stopped, creating a little enclosed hollow of warmth. Beyond the pool of light, there could be anything, hiding out there in the dark. 

Dib knew he didn’t want to see what was out there. This little island of light was the last safe place Dib had left. Even if Zim was here to rip it apart, he hadn’t started tearing _yet_. It was like they were floating together, a little, bright asteroid in the vacuum of space. It was like he and Zim were the only two people in the world. The only two living beings in the entire city. And if Dib spoke too loudly, that illusion would shatter, and blood would start seeping under the curtains and this weird, dreamlike moment would turn back into a nightmare.

(Debra was on duty tonight.)

“They’re fine,” Zim said, his own voice oddly hushed. Maybe he felt the fragility of the moment too.

He held up something in his hand and Dib flinched back before realizing that he recognized it. It was the remote control device Zim had shown him in the cafeteria, a million years ago. For the mind control cupcakes.

“Zim has perfected it,” Zim said, still uncharacteristically quiet. The corners of his mouth curled up, pleased with himself. “It no longer makes the soft head meats bleed. Most of the time.”

“Oh,” Dib said and he wasn’t sure what to say next.

He wondered if he should scream, or try to hit his panic button, but neither of those seemed like real options. Just vague theories to be considered then tossed aside. There was no one here who could help him now that Zim was here. It was already too late.

The feeling of helplessness was almost comforting in its familiarity.

_(You may feel helpless, but know that you are not. Help will be there for you when you need it._ Except what use was help that he couldn’t ask for? And he _could not_ ask. There was not a single person he could ask to put themselves in the line of fire when it came to Zim, because they would always, without exception, be going in unprepared. Not even Dib had been prepared.)

Zim was twiddling his thumbs, the sharp tips of his gloves making tiny sounds as they caught on each other. “Do you like your comfort scorpion?” he asked. “I made it extra soft.”

Cautiously, Dib ran his fingers over the toy scorpion in his lap. It was extra soft.

“It’s nice,” Dib said.

“Humans like soft things.”

“We do.”

“According to my research—”

“What are you doing here, Zim?” Dib interrupted. Something, tiny, but growing, flickered to life in his chest, chasing away the cold. That old standby instinct that told him to push, always, no matter the cost. (Maybe the comfort scorpion really was doing the trick.) “Obviously,” Dib said, his voice still quiet, but gaining strength, “you’ve watched enough TV or whatever to know you bring presents to people in the hospital, but _why_ did you come here? Actually, forget that, how did you even get in?”

“Oh,” Zim perked up, _“easily.”_

He launched into a monologue, hands waving, legs swinging in the air, like it was just another Friday afternoon and Dib was his captive audience, but only until dinner time.

According to Zim, he had infiltrated Dib’s “healing fortress-prison” by disguising Minimoose as a nurse and having him plant spy cameras all over the hospital. Using them, and tracking the movements of the guards, he had figured out which room was Dib’s. His first attempt had been foiled by “filthy, stupid, _impossible_ human locks!”

The next attempt went a little better—Zim had tunneled up from the room below, but had almost been caught by a guard. That was when he’d realized the guards themselves were his biggest obstacle.

“So, I followed the female one who is always talking to you home.”

“Debra?” Dib’s breath caught in his lungs.

“If you say so. Anyway, I implanted the chip in her while she slept. And—this part is really clever—let _her_ tag the rest of her filthy coworkers. It took about four days to get everyone I needed online,” Zim said, twirling his hand in the air. “Calibrations took another day, and then Gir insisted on going to the zoo, and the cleanup from _that_ took all Thursday, but then it was today and Zim’s brilliant plan went off without a hitch!” 

Zim looked expectantly at Dib, waiting for him to be impressed, and suddenly Dib was angry. He was so goddamn angry that Zim could waltz in here after upending Dib’s entire life, throw a stuffed scorpion at his head, and expect Dib to clap politely as he cheerfully explained to Dib how he’d circumvented security measures invented by the most brilliant human alive.

He was getting a headache. His doctors had told him to avoid stress while his concussion cleared up, and here he was getting a tension headache.

“Zim, get out,” he said. “I’m done. I don’t want to play anymore.”

Zim blinked, thrown out of his self-congratulatory reverie. “What?”

“I said go _away_. Go back to your base and just—” Dib dragged his hand down his face “—leave me alone.”

“No?” Zim didn’t even pause. “I just got here, Dib-human, don’t be stupid. The visit cannot end until we have had a ‘touching moment’ or ‘dramatic revelation.’ You think Zim has not researched this? Zim knows everything about your _hospitals_.”

“This isn’t Grey’s fucking _Anatomy_, Zim—”

“Of course not. None of your incompetent Earth-healers are nearly symmetrical enough—”

“That’s not what I mean,” Dib said. He folded his hands in his lap, finger over finger so it wasn’t as obvious how much they shook. “I mean there’s not going to be a heart-felt _moment_ or any kind of _revelation_. This isn’t _TV_. I just want you to leave me alone. No more fights, no more schemes, no more me chasing you around every night. You can have fun inventing hamster guns and moose portals and—” Dib’s momentum faltered, his voice cracking “—and killing people. You can do that by yourself. I’m moving on.”

He risked a glance at Zim’s face and saw pure confusion. _“Why?”_ Zim said.

“Because—” Dib paused, he’d been mentally braced for Zim to explode at him. He’d expected rage, an attack, to wake up the next morning in a crumpled, bloody heap, if he woke up at all. “Um.” Dib’s hands twisted in his lap, the splint still on his thumb bumping awkwardly against his other fingers. “You gave me a skull fracture,” Dib said. “That could have killed me, if it had been just a little bit worse.” Dib’s eyes were firmly on his hands, but out of the corner of his eye, he saw Zim flinch.

“And has your skull been fully repaired?” Zim asked. He sounded casual, but Dib thought that wasn’t true.

“No,” Dib said. All at once, he was exhausted. He wanted to go to sleep and not wake up for a year. Maybe if Zim hurt him badly enough this time, they’d put him in a medically induced coma. That sounded nice. “It’ll take a few months. Maybe less. I heal fast. But do you get it?” He risked a look at Zim’s face. “Do you get why I can’t do this anymore?”

Zim stared at him for a long moment. Dib stared back, his heartbeat ratcheting up with every second Zim didn’t react.

Then Zim sighed—Dib flinched—and reached up to his own face. He pulled off his wig, unsticking the little pieces of tape that kept his antennae down. He dropped it on the floor. He peeled off one contact lens, then the other. He let them both fall on top of the wig, and looked at Dib with his shiny insect eyes. In the soft, warm light of the lamp, they looked almost the color of pomegranate seeds.

Dib wondered if this was their touching moment.

“I,” Zim said and stopped. He frowned, staring at Dib, and it was harder to tell where Zim was looking without the contacts, but Dib got the impression that Zim was really looking at him. Taking in every bruise and half-healed cut. “Zim,” he said, “did,” his feet flexed back and forth in their boots, “not,” he screwed up his face, like he was tasting something unpleasant. “It was not Zim’s intention to kill you.”

“Okay.”

“Nor to—incapacitate you for any length of time. I am now more aware of the pathetic limitations of the fragile human body. It won’t happen again.”

If Zim was trying to be reassuring, he was failing. Oh, he was putting in a decent _effort_, but that didn’t stop Dib from thinking that if this was the shape he ended up in when Zim _wasn’t_ trying to kill him, what would happen if Zim ever decided that he _did_ want him dead. Forget ending up in a tank, would there even be a body left?

Hearing Zim almost-but-not-quite apologize seemed wrong. These were unknown waters that Dib wasn’t sure he wanted to explore. Who knew what was hiding in the depths.

Zim was waiting. Dib had to answer.

“I don’t think you can really promise not to hurt me again,” Dib said. “That’s what we do.”

“_Yes_.” Zim leaned forward, nodding as if Dib had just confirmed something for him. “Yes, Zim will never stop causing you pain. Never, ever, ever, I _promise_. Just not quite so,” he gestured at Dib, “head breaky.”

Dib stared at Zim long enough that the pleased look began to slip from his face.

“The fuck is wrong with you?” he said.

Zim frowned. “Nothing is wrong with me. Why are _you_ rude?”

Dib sighed. He picked up the toy scorpion, turning it over in his hands. “Look,” he said and then stopped because he didn’t know what to say next. “I just—” 

The issue was Zim lived and breathed violence. He was a soldier, an invader, someone who could _apparently_ commit murder and not blink. Dib didn’t know how to explain to someone like that that he kept waking up in the middle of the night remembering the meaty smell of Kreg’s guts. The scent of his own blood.

“—I just want to move on, okay? I don’t want to fight anymore. I thought I wanted to play for life or death stakes, but I _don’t_.” The words spilled out of Dib’s mouth in a torrent, unstoppable now that it had started. “Gaz was right—it was stupid before. It was just a dumb game I thought I was playing, and I took it _so_ seriously, but I _didn’t_ take it seriously, and it is _so fucked up_, Zim. I can’t believe it took this much for me to realize how fucked up and _not_ a game it is. I almost died. I cannot stress enough that I _almost died_. I just want to go work at my dad’s labs, go to college, take a picture of Big Foot. I can’t do that and fight you.”

Dib swallowed, feeling the corners of his eyes prickle. There was a long, heavy silence where Dib twisted his fingers in the scorpion’s fuzz and didn’t look at Zim.

“You only want to stop because you’re afraid you won’t win,” Zim said. An accusation. _“Pathetic._ Zim expected better of you, Earth’s _self-declared_ protector.”

“That’s not—” Dib looked up, outraged, only to freeze. Zim was standing at the edge of the bed, inches away. Dib hadn’t heard him move.

“Well, that’s not happening,” Zim hissed at him, his fingers curling over the plastic side of Dib’s bed. “I do not give you _permission_ to stop. You will beat Zim, and you will lose to Zim, over and over again until I rule this disgusting planet, or you capture me, and cut me open for your filthy scientists to gawk at. The win conditions were _set_. How _dare_ you try to change them, you feculent _cheat_.”

Dib gaped at him. “You _idiot_,” he said, aware somewhere in the back of his mind that it was the wrong move and _not_ caring. “I’m not playing! I _just_ explained this. And I don’t need your permission! If I say I’m done, I _am_.”

_“Shut up.”_ Zim lunged at him, clawed hands reaching. Dib shrank back, wedging himself into the corner where the head of his bed met the raised side of the bed. Zim stopped, letting his hands drop to his sides.

He crossed his arms, shifting his weight. There was a long pause where Zim contemplated the floor and the only sound was the ragged pound of Dib’s heart in his ears.

“And what do you imagine,” Zim said eventually, “Zim will do while you are busy ‘moving on’?” He made air quotes.

“I don’t know,” Dib whispered. “Study the planet more? I thought you’d be happy not to have me interfering anymore. You can do whatever you want.”

Zim snorted. Somehow. Without a nose. “Idiotic human. As if it were that simple.”

“It seems pretty simple to me.”

“That’s because you’re stupid,” Zim said. “No, this is not acceptable. Nothing will change. You will continue to fight Zim, foolishly and annoyingly.”

“No,” said Dib, “I won’t.”

Zim was on the bed before Dib could blink, the mattress barely even dipping under his weight. He stood, his feet planted on either side of Dib’s knees, looking down at him.

There had been times in the past Dib regretted sticking to his guns, but never so acutely as right now.

“Why are you being so difficult?” Zim said, contemplative. “Is this a symptom of getting your fragile human brain meats bruised? A natural talent? You always _were_ uniquely stupid.” In this moment, Dib couldn’t argue with that. “Do you think I will leave you alone if you tell me enough times? Do you think someone will come to save you if only you distract me long enough? No one is coming, and Zim is going nowhere.”

Dib swallowed a mouthful of bile. It burned all the way down, like liquid nitrogen.

Zim bent at the waist, bringing his face level with Dib’s. Dib tried to shrink back further, but there was nowhere left to go. He clenched his hands in his lap so hard he felt his stitches pull. 

“Humans are forgetful,” Zim said. 

Dib’s eyes slid sideways—looking at Zim was too much. He wanted to hide his face like a little kid, like the monster would go away if he couldn’t see it. His whole world narrowed and there was nothing in his head except the need to get _away_. His eyes roved around the room, looking for anything. Table, lamp, get well cards—

His eyes landed on the vase full of asparagus.

Zim made a thoughtful noise in the back of his throat. “Maybe Zim should give you a reminder of who you’re dealing with—”

Asparagus went flying as Dib smashed the vase on the corner of the table. He grabbed a big shard of clear glass, not caring when the edges cut into his palm, and shoved it into Zim’s neck.

Pink blood flowed over his fingers, soaking into the sleeve of his pajama top. A garbled, hissing, static sound came from Zim’s mouth, before coalescing into words. “You’ve really got a death wish, don’t you, Dib-stink.”

Zim shoved him back, hard enough that pain shot through his ribs, even though there was nothing behind him but pillows.

Dib lay, prone and gasping, as Zim’s PAK legs shot out, off and to either side of the bed, caging Dib in. Zim rose, suspended. He yanked the glass out of his neck in a spray of blood. Deep in the jagged gash in his neck, something sparked.

He lowered himself, slowly, until his face was inches from Dib’s.

Dib saw himself reflected in the thousand tiny facets of Zim’s eyes and wondered _what_ it was in himself that made him kick every hornet’s nest he found. After a while, it couldn’t even be called scientific curiosity. He knew the nest was filled with hornets, but he couldn’t stop.

Zim opened his mouth and spoke—or tried to. The first half came out as a gush of static and jumbled up half-words, like a radio caught between stations. “W—do—bzzt—have to say for yourself, _Dib?_” Pink blood dribbled out of his mouth along with the words. W—why do you act like this?”

Dib couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything but watch the blood drip down Zim’s chin. Zim waited, silent.

(He should have known better than to think this would end in anything other than blood.)

“I’m so fucking scared of you,” Dib whispered into the silence, into the space between Zim’s face and his.

“You should be,” Zim whispered back, his voice a distorted buzz, his eyes wide and red and horrifically, terribly lucid. “You should have vomited in fear the first time you laid eyes on Zim. You know _nothing_ of Zim’s deeds. Zim has killed _schmillions_. Zim has killed every person he’s ever met. There is no one left. Just me. And you.”

It took Dib a second to realize he genuinely had no idea what Zim was talking about. _“What?”_ he said. “That doesn’t make any—like _everyone_ we go to school with is alive. Except—Kreg,” he trailed off.

“Don’t be stupid,” Zim said. “Humans aren’t people.” 

He drew back and with every inch he moved away, it became a little easier for Dib to breathe. He sat down cross legged at the foot of the bed. Not touching Dib, but close enough that he could be on Dib in seconds. He did not retract his legs. They remained, bracketing the bed like prison bars.

Slowly, Dib sat up, drawing his legs up, away from Zim. He planted his feet flat on the bed, trying to ground himself. He rubbed at the bandages on his wrists—they itched so much it was almost painful—and mentally sorted through Zim’s words. Something there wasn’t adding up.

“But,” Dib said, pressing his unbroken thumb into his stitches until the pain drowned out the itching, “I’m a person. You said so. It’s just me and you.”

Zim scratched at the base of one antenna, making it twitch. “Eh, who knows. Whatever you are, you belong to Zim.”

“What is _wrong_ with you?”

_“Nothing_ is wrong with me. Zim is the best Irken invader alive.”

Dib licked his lips. Zim was talking around something, Dib knew that in his viscera. Something big and dark and terrible.

(The way to measure a black hole, was to watch the objects that orbited around it, tighter and tighter, until they were sucked in.)

“Why is this so important to you?” Dib asked. “Why do you hate the idea of me moving on so much?”

“It—” Zim frowned. He wiped blood off his chin, then again, harder, when that barely did anything. “I can’t work like this,” he muttered under his breath. A compartment in his PAK slid open and Dib tensed, but he was only pulling out a device that looked like a thick Juul. Out of another compartment in his PAK, a jointed wire, thinner than his legs, snaked out. It had what was unmistakably a cheap, plastic hand mirror duct taped to the end.

Zim angled the mirror and pressed the device to the top of the gash. There was a click and Zim winced. He moved it down and did it again. It took Dib a couple of seconds to realize that he was stapling his own throat shut.

He finished, and put away his staple gun. He rotated his neck, checking the tensile strength of the staples. Finally, he seemed satisfied, and his eyes returned to Dib.

“You—” Zim said and then stopped. His voice was clearer and steadier now. The words still buzzed around the edges, but they held their shape.

Zim fidgeted. “You stopped me,” he said, finally.

“Yeah, I’ve stopped you lots of times,” Dib said, but Zim interrupted him, shaking his head. 

“No. You—” Zim waved his hands, struggling for the right words for an unfamiliar concept. “You stopped me. Last year.”

“Yeah, I _know_,” Dib said, exasperation making it to the surface of his emotions. The panic was starting to drain out of him, his still-healing body unable to maintain that level of adrenaline for very long. He was still wary, tense, but achingly aware of his own exhaustion.

Zim stared at him, mute frustration in every line of his body. He grit his teeth. “Completing my mission on this planet has become an impossibility.”

“What?” Dib leaned forward, over his knees. A tiny, almost invisible glimmer of something flickered to life in his chest. “Why?” He asked, suspiciously. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone native because I won’t believe you.”

“Of course not.” Zim’s antennae were angled back and down, nearly touching his skull. They’d been inching their way down since Zim had mentioned last year’s near-apocalypse. “Tell me what my mission is.”

Dib blinked, frowned, decided to play along. “You want to conquer Earth for your evil space empire.”

“Yes. That mission is no longer viable.”

“Okay, why—” Zim flinched back, curling in on himself, and it was so unexpected, such a _vulnerable_ gesture that it stopped Dib in his tracks. Slowly, very slowly, Dib stretched his legs back out until his feet were by Zim, at the end of the bed.

(For the first time, he noticed how tacky the sheets were with Zim’s blood.)

“Zim?” He tried. When Zim didn’t reply, Dib, very cautiously, poked him with one toe. “Zim?” No response. 

Stealing himself, Dib pushed the ball of his foot flat against Zim’s thigh, rocking the little alien back and forth until Zim’s hand shot out, clamping around his ankle. “Zim,” sharp claws dug into his skin, “tell me why your mission is over.”

Zim’s grip on him tightened, but he answered. “I cannot conquer this planet for the glory of the Irken Empire,” Zim’s antennae flattened fully, then rose, then flattened again, “because there is no Empire left. The Armada is destroyed. Irken broadcast signals are silent. The last time I saw the Tallest, they were trapped on a burning ship somewhere between this dimension and the next.”

“Oh,” said Dib.

He became aware, in a sudden burst of intuition, that whatever he did next would determine the course of everything. Possibly the fate of the whole world.

The weight felt familiar.

“It’s all gone?” Dib asked, voice soft.

Zim nodded miserably. “Only Zim remains. Of my mission, only _you_ remain. That is why you are not permitted to—to toss Zim aside.” He had never seen Zim like this, even when his leaders had abandoned him. That had been sad, kind of pathetic. Looking at Zim now was like looking at an open wound.

“Do you understand?” Zim asked and the buzz in his voice sounded like hornets.

In his mind’s eye, Dib saw his foot drawing back.

“What you’re saying,” he said, “is that I won.”

Dib’s head snapped back. He didn’t even feel the pain at first, just the impact, then the sensation of wetness on his face. He sat back up, tasting blood in his mouth. He bared his teeth at Zim, who stood over him, chest heaving, fists clenched by his sides.

He bunched his fists in Dib’s shirt, but Dib didn’t flinch. Pain and rage poured off him like vapor off dry ice and Dib drank it all down, grinning. He snorted through his nose and blood sprayed onto Zim’s face, red mixing with pink.

(Hey, they matched.)

Zim’s grip on his shirt tightened, the soft fabric tearing. His metal legs retracted, drawing up and in so the points hovered just on the edges of Dib’s vision. But Dib’s grin didn’t falter for a moment, even as his heart did its best to beat out of his chest.

Zim wasn’t going to kill him. Not on purpose and not by accident. Not when he was the only thing Zim had left. And with that knowledge came a high-flying _freedom_. A rush like jumping out of an airplane. Dib reveled in it, gulped it down. After ten days spent in a helpless, paranoid haze, the taste of power was like—like flying a spaceship for the first time, like someone had replaced his meds with Molly, like the gut-punch of a good orgasm.

Dib wrapped his hands around Zim’s wrists, feeling the delicate bones grind. He pressed his forehead into Zim’s, the little _thunk_ reverberating through them both.

“Why should I bother with you?” he breathed, right into Zim’s face. This close, he could smell the tangy-sweet scent of Zim’s blood. “Oh, my God, I can’t believe I _beat_ you and you didn’t even tell me for a whole fucking year! Tell me why should I _bother_ with you, now that I’ve won?”

“You have not _won_,” Zim hissed. “Zim has not _lost_. Zim _does not_ lose.”

“You haven’t won against me once!” Dib laughed, which wasn’t entirely true, but wasn’t entirely _untrue_.

_“Winning is not the point of you.”_

“The fuck is the point then?” Dib shoved Zim back, holding him at arm's length, relishing every second he spent pushing and not getting stabbed for it. Loving the burning, impotent fury in Zim’s face. The _hurt_. _God_ it felt good to be on the offensive again. “Humanity’s safe! I don’t need to do shit. I don’t even need to expose you. You can rot in your base all by yourself.”

(Dib was not a kind person.)

“Why shouldn’t I dump you like last year’s iPhone, huh? What’s the benefit for _me?_ Letting you forget that you’re all alone? Letting you pretend that you’re not the _last of your species?_ Well, you are, and I don’t _care.”_

(But he understood loneliness. It was a knife that slipped through your ribs and into your heart. It was sharp and cold enough to gut.)

“Man, did I really kick the ass of a whole alien empire myself? I guess the guidance counselor really was onto something. All it takes is believing in yourself—”

Zim yanked his hands out of Dib’s grip and Dib had to grit his teeth against a yelp as his broken finger was jostled. 

Zim pointed a trembling finger at him, and the tips of all four of his PAK legs pointed with him. Even flying high, Dib had to admit the effect was pretty intimidating.

_“You_ have kicked _nothing,_” Zim hissed. “How dare you imply a _dirt animal_ like you could defeat the Armada. How _dare_ you try to take credit for what—” His voice ratcheted up and up into a ragged howl “—A _million million_ solar systems have fallen before the Armada! The breadth and span of the Empire are _beyond_ your _comprehension_. Its glory is _unmatched_. And it is gone.” Zim’s voice dropped to a harsh whisper. _“I_ summoned the florpus, _I_ teleported the Earth, _I_ put it in the path of the Armada and _no one_ saw it coming because it was _brilliant!_ Zim did it! _Me._”

Zim’s rage switched off like a light. His hands dropped, his antennae drooped. Metal legs retracted back into his PAK. He sat back down on the bed, next to Dib, looking away from him, towards the side table with its smashed vase and damp get well soon cards.

Dib looked at the top of Zim’s head, not sure what to do next. Not sure how he should be feeling.

Zim reached out, absently, and pushed a bit of glass off the table. It fell to the floor with a little tink. Zim poked one of the cards, knocking it on its side.

“You think humanity is safe now that the Empire is gone?” Zim asked, deceptively casual.

“Safer, yeah,” Dib said. His instincts were screaming at him, but he didn’t know what direction the danger was coming from.

Zim picked up a card, flipping it over in his hands. It was the card Gaz had bought him from the hospital gift shop, the one with “or else” scribbled in under _Get Well_.

“Your family cares about you, don’t they,” Zim said, and Dib was so unused to subtlety from Zim that it took him a second to hear the subtext.

“What.”

Zim flicked the edge of the card with one claw and placed it back on the table. “Without you as a constant thorn in my side, I will have much more time to devote to my research. I will need additional test subjects. Many, many more.” He tilted his head back, one shiny red eye meeting Dib’s. “I wonder if your sister-unit knows about ‘shock.’”

_“Zim—”_

“Do you think your parental-unit will finally believe you when I cut him open?” Zim’s neck twisted further, just past what a human could do. “Do you think his last thoughts would be of you? How you were _right_. Would you like that, Dib-thing? Is that what you’ve always wanted? Zim could give that to you. A gift.”

“Stay the fuck away from my family,” Dib said, voice cracking, _hating_ it as the bright feeling of power slipped away from him, leaving him cold, scared, and helpless. “I swear, I’ll—” he grabbed Zim’s antennae at the roots, pulling Zim’s head back even further, but Zim only laughed.

“You’ll _what?_ Stop Zim? Fight Zim? _Kill_ Zim?”

There was a quiet _shh_ sound and Dib felt the cold press of metal under his chin. He pulled back harder on Zim’s antennae, not caring, making Zim wince. He was bent over backwards now, his head almost in Dib’s lap. The lamp light glinted off his teeth, bared in something halfway between a grin and a snarl.

Through those teeth Zim hissed, “Do you really expect me to believe you want to live in a safe, comfortable little bubble like the rest of your brain dead species? _You?_”

“I _do_,” Dib said, shaking Zim’s head back and forth, not caring about the warm liquid he felt dripping down his neck from where the knife-point of Zim’s leg pressed into his flesh. “Not the bubble thing. I just don’t want to fight. It’s different now.”

“Nothing has changed for _you_,” Zim scoffed. “Zim is as he has always been, and Zim is all that matters.”

The PAK leg against Dib’s throat retracted, then Zim jabbed him between his thumb and forefinger, making his entire hand go tingly and numb. 

He slipped out of Dib’s grip and turned to face him, something held in his hand. It took Dib a second to recognize it as the remote control for the brain chips. Zim wiggled it at him. “No more grabbing,” he said and the threat was implied. The guards were fine now, but that could change.

Dib swallowed, flexing his tingling fingers. “You know that’s bullshit.”

“Eh?”

“‘Nothing’s changed’, you _know_ that’s bullshit. _Everything_ has changed. The literal composition of the _universe_ has changed. Things are never going back to the way they were. They can’t. We have to choose what comes next.”

Zim frowned, but he didn’t argue. “Okay,” he said.

Dib took a slow breath. “Don’t come near my family.”

“Don’t abandon Zim.”

“Fine.”

Zim nodded and Dib paused. Either he’d been hit harder than he thought, or Dib had just successfully negotiated.

“Don’t kill people. Uh, human people,” Dib tried.

Zim snorted. “No.”

Dib grit his teeth against a wave of nausea and tried again. “Don’t kill too many people.”

Zim thought about it for a minute. “Fine.”

Dib licked his lips. “Don’t try to conquer Earth anymore?”

It was taking everything Dib had not to flinch in the face of Zim’s steady, red gaze. Even knowing what he knew now, part of him was still convinced that Zim might decide to cut his losses and shove a PAK leg through Dib’s heart at any moment. He wasn’t sure that part was wrong.

Zim was silent for a long moment. Finally, he said, “I am going to the planet Geg-Gargle next week to collect smelk crystals. Come with me, and do not interfere.”

Dib would have rather chewed off one of his arms than get into a spaceship with Zim, but it was ultimately a small price to pay for a whole planet. Dib was the (self-declared) protector of Earth and had been since he was twelve. Never had he ever imagined saving the day could be so tiny, and anticlimactic, and terrible.

“Also, babysit GIR next Tuesday,” Zim added, because he could never resist adding insult to injury.

“Fine,” Dib said, and that was that. There were too many threats still hanging in the air and too much blood on Dib’s sheets for it to be called a peaceful resolution, but no one had died. Dib felt very, very off-kilter.

“Good,” Zim said. He picked up the toy scorpion from where it had gotten shoved to the foot of the bed and placed it in Dib’s hands. He climbed off the bed and walked towards the curtains, out of the puddle of lamplight, obviously about to leave.

“Where are you going?” Dib blurted, holding his scorpion awkwardly. “Are you seriously just leaving after all that?”

Zim paused, his hand gripping the edge of the curtains. His face, when he glanced back at Dib, was half lit and half in shadow. Chiaroscuro. “Yeah, of course,” he said. “We had our shocking revelation and our touching moment. The visit is over.”

And with that, he opened the curtains and let the darkness in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um, wow. I could say this fic got bigger than I intended, but honestly? I always planned for it to be pretty long. I just thought it would be, uh, like 15k instead of 24k. But the RESPONSE, my dudes. I’m so blown away by the thoughtful, in depth, analytical comments I’ve gotten on this fic. I thought I was taking a risk by writing what is at once a straight horror story and a crack-taken-seriously fic (the crack being the show itself), but apparently y’all are as into the spooky silly scares as me. 
> 
> Come visit me on [tumblr](%E2%80%9Clargishcat.tumblr.com%E2%80%9D)! I don’t post much IZ on there, but I’m always happy to talk Irken politics and fridge horror.


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